


Paris Is Burning

by PaxVobis



Series: Original Album Series [2]
Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: 1980s, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Withdrawal, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Beating, Black Character(s), Blood and Violence, Body Dysphoria, Canon Trans Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Doing A Crime, Domestic Violence, Drug Abuse, Escape, Falling In Love, Faster Pussycat - Freeform, First Kiss, Flash Forward, Flashbacks, Foster Care, Found Family, Gender Dysphoria, Glam Rock, Graphic Violence, Guns N Roses References, HIV/AIDS, Hallucinations, Heroin, Historical References, Hitchhiking, Hollywood Boulevard, Homelessness, Hope vs. Despair, Hospitalization, House Music, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Underage Relationship(s), Imprisonment, Knives, Los Angeles, Loss of Innocence, Loss of Virginity, Manipulation, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Other, Overdose, POV Second Person, Paranoia, Past Child Abuse, Physical Abuse, Playlist, Police, Pre-Band, Pre-SNB, Preklok, Punk Rock, Queer History, Rape Recovery, Recovery, Riki Rachtman, Running Away, Santa Monica Boulevard, Self-Destruction, Sex Work, Sex Worker-Phobic Language, Sex workers, Snakes N Barrels, Starvation, Street Rats, Strippers & Strip Clubs, Therapy, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans History, Trans Male Character, Transitioning, Transphobia, Trauma, Underage Drinking, Underage Prostitution, Underage Smoking, Vomiting, Young Love, Youth Shelters, all right that's the gnarliest bits, he p much kills an attempted rapist near the start too so you should know that, he's 16 - 17 pretty much, self-sabotage, trans original character, trans pickles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-04-22 18:05:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14314224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: When you drop out of the cab that night just outside the depot, slinging your guitar after you, the driver smiles down at you through the dark and says,Welcome to the jungle, baby.  You’re gonna die.And you are.// Multi-chapter fic about survival on the streets of Los Angeles as Pickles arrives for the first time in 1987, having fled Wisconsin and hitchhiked across the country to pursue his dream of being a rock star.  Themes of self-sabotage, trauma, bodies, trans history, and the sacrifice of the self for record sale.R18+ ONLY, adult themes, sexual content and examinations of dysphoria and abuse.Chapter 11 - Right Next Door To Hell - up now.<<-- Shoots and Ladders || Garden of Eden -->>





	1. Strange Boys Play Weird Openings

**Author's Note:**

> **CONTENT ADVISORY:**  
>  This fic features an underage main character and contains depictions of:  
> GRAPHIC trauma symptoms  
> GRAPHIC alcoholism  
> GRAPHIC drug withdrawal  
> GRAPHIC drug use  
> GRAPHIC violence  
> SEMI-GRAPHIC sexual assault / rape / prostitution  
> SEMI-GRAPHIC rape threats  
> SEMI-GRAPHIC dysphoria  
> SEMI-GRAPHIC suicide attempts  
> SEMI-GRAPHIC transphobia  
> SEMI-GRAPHIC homophobia  
> NON-GRAPHIC (implied) sexual assault  
> NON-GRAPHIC (implied) self-harm  
> NON-GRAPHIC (implied) sex work  
> NON-GRAPHIC (implied) AIDS crisis
> 
> Please proceed with caution. At the bottom of each chapter is a collection of links to hotlines and resources in case you need them.

It is 1991 and the door to your apartment slams as a girl called Poppy or Star or something stupid lets herself out.  It’s an overcast day, and the grim city of Los Angeles spread outside your windows looks sweltering and feverish, like it’s sweating out an illness, and it is.

In 1991, there’s a lot of talk about illness.  It was only meant to kill some people, deviants, but instead it’s killed many, many more.  Your secret in 1991 is that you are a deviant, but as far as you know you haven’t got the illness – there was a check when you went under for the surgery a few years ago, and you didn’t have it then.  You remain convinced that you are okay, since the scars have healed, since your looks have gone from milk-skinned, anorexic fae to tight muscles, a bearded, horny young goat, but you know Los Angeles harbours more illness than just those that live in the blood.

Mental illnesses, body illnesses, spiritual sick.  You stay here too long and you get them, you come down with them, and they start to eat away at your insides.  Standing in the middle of your trashed apartment, gazing dead-eyed around at the strewn cans and bottles, the smashed TV, the open guitar case, the Gibson Goldtop on the floor scratched along its curve where it hit the glass, bottle in your hand hard against your rings, you know you are sick.  Advice from a shattered, teenage memory of deviancy, _get used to the feeling of rotting._   _Jevo..._ and as the city decays beneath you, for every attempt you’ve made to cut it out, still this rots inside you.

You put your hand over your face in shame, your chest still heaving as you catch your breath.  You’re still a teenager, but not for much longer.  Maybe half a year.  Nineteen feels like the end of your life.  Barely anyone knows, you’ve lied for so long about being twenty-one – you’ve been twenty-one for four years.  You’ve got another two of it at least, and then why not start lying again – be twenty-one for life.  In 1991, with a groupie running out of your apartment from a screaming match of _whore_ and _slut_ and _cunt_ , just because you were standing there listening to her flirt and coo about your luxuries, _are all these your guitars?  Oh wow!  Chivas... the cognac – is this the Nazi stuff from that interview in the Stone?  Oh Pickles, these cigars... Hoja Prieta...?  Oh, c’mon, Pickles, baby, let’s share a cigar..._ and you couldn’t... take it, any longer, her innocence in it – not innocence, _ignorance._   How stupid she was, throwing her lot in with rock stars, pawning her love and her body off to decaying shit like you.  Like these were medals of achievement, of triumph, and not just the pleasures heaped upon you by the gluttons that ran the record companies, the TV stations, the corporations – things to keep you dumb, things to keep you sick.  Things to keep you empty.  And how she could not recognise that she was one of them.  That you are one of them, too.

For what it’s worth, you’re sorry.  Your hand pushed through your hair across your sweat-covered forehead, trembling where you stand.  You can defend the shouting and the slurs, but you don’t know what possessed you to pick up the guitar like that, like it was, like you call it on stage, an axe – you didn’t hit her.  You slung it at the TV.  Can still hear it buzzing as you sink to your knees where you stand, your cowboy boots sliding akimbo across the carpet until the seat of your tight blue levis hits your heels.  It was like something just snapped – you went from nothing to screaming, which was normal, everything these days is nothing or screaming, and then you went from screaming to smashing, and that’s not... strange... but you don’t usually try to smash girls.  Like in your head, she was just a thing right then... like you wanted to slap her and tell her to come to her senses, to get the fuck out of this room, out of this city.  To run away from you.  Yeah.  You want them all to run away from you, just get out, but it hurts so much to see them leave.

It never used to be like this.  Like you said, it’s Los Angeles that’s sick, that’s poison.  Before you came to this city, you were a hurt kid, sure, but you never hurt anyone else.  Least of all those girls, who you needed, as without them who would have touched you in any way but a slap?  Remember crouching on her bedroom carpet over the candle, the way the flame made her clear eyes look like glass... the rain falling in the garden, your first L.A. autumn... when songs would just come to you, standing over the piano in her lounge room, the first keyboard you’d seen in years – an F chord... and then A minor.  The mindless kindness of the streets, as kind as they were cruel – people, rotting, that woman, rotting.  When you are as broken as you are the rot gets in easily, like mould creeping inside you, and it crawled into your heart so fast; and laying on her bed in her childhood bedroom, the beautiful lace nets over you, holding her hands – you could already feel that she was intact, and in danger of contracting it with every palm to palm, heart to heart, that shit that was eating you out, leaving you empty.

And so it is better, to be alone.  Once you thought you had a monster, a separate being that possessed your body when someone tried to hurt you, but now you know you are that monster.  When you came to this city, that monster was just a crack behind wide-open eyes and big dreams, a crack where you were dropped as a child, or as a teen, a crack where fingers forced their way in and proved to you that no one had your best interests at heart, that no one wanted you except as something to break.  Los Angeles, which should have been the dream, dug its fingers into that hairline and dragged it gaping open.  Now no matter which fingers you let inside yourself, all you can feel is crawling and your body tightening, ready to snap at them, drive them away.  Beautiful girls, innumerable beautiful girls, lovers, dancers, actresses, models, L.A. is full of them, every city is.  But you could not let them in.  They deserve better than that, snapping, shredding, begging, rotting, a rock star who is a puppeted corpse.  And if you can warn off someone you loved so desperately, maybe you can warn them all.

But it shouldn’t have to be like this.  Not with broken bottles.  Not with axes.  If only you could drive them all away.  If only you could survive, alone.  If only you could just shoot yourself, slumped here in your livingroom in front of the broken TV – in the thick L.A. air, suffocating down around you – run to the bedroom, fetch the rifle from under your mattress and blow your brains out, right now – but the album will sell better if you wait another few weeks before painting the wall with the rot, and the blood, and fragments of bone – so.  If no one’s around you, it’ll be easy to do it then.  If no one knows.  Until then, you’ll hold on; just a few more weeks of the fever dream, of drowning your final death throes in booze until you can’t move anymore, of sedatives.  And then no one will see it coming.  Blackness, endless sleep without dreaming.  And you won’t be able to hurt anyone else.

This is a song called _[Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ17-J33aMg)_ , and it’s by Bob Dylan.  This is lying on the floor of a woman’s apartment in Florence in 1987, hearing it for the first time on your Walkman, your eyes closed, knowing already that you’re dying.  And this is it, now, at the end of your dream, a pin dropped onto an old record, and a new bottle of Chivas Regal opened under your sinewy fingers, something to keep you quiet for another night, and send you to sleep, alone.  It doesn’t matter.  You’d rather just not dream, anymore. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In progress, always appreciate the comments.
> 
> This has been a heavy fic to write so I can only imagine it is to read. Here are some links if you need the support (all USA, I'm afraid, as I note the majority of my audience is American). Please don't feel afraid to ask for help, you matter.
> 
> [24/7 National Suicide Prevention Helpline](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)  
> [24/7 Lifeline Chat](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/)  
> [18/7 Trans Lifeline](https://www.translifeline.org/)  
> [Resources For Surviors of Sexual Assault and Their Loved Ones (inc. hotlines) (RAINN)](https://www.rainn.org/national-resources-sexual-assault-survivors-and-their-loved-ones)  
> [Human Trafficking Hotline](https://humantraffickinghotline.org/)


	2. The Angels

Y’know, Hollywood, it was supposed to be a dream.  Of a thousand albums and hits on the radio, sitting in the bowling alley in Tomahawk, fantasising about your wild teenage life on the outside of this freezing, dead, bitch of a place – think, California, sun, beaches, street kids, girls in short dresses, rock music.  It shoulda been so lovely.  But it hadn’t been like...easy, the drive across.  Your heart had been set on those two letters, _L.A._ , and all the movies and shit, they made it look so simple.  Do it in songs – hey, yeah, let’s do it in songs – this one’s called _[Roadrunner](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZWoJ8_75Mo)_  and it’s by the Modern Lovers, and in 1987 you have a little plastic Walkman and in your bag you have this album from 1972, from fifteen years ago but dang, it feels right on an overnight bus... staring out the window, listening to the engine behind, your head pressed against the glass in a permanent blur of alcoholism.  There was a dream, of cool teenagers called _Foxy_ and _Cherie_ , a dream of boozy nights and clubs and it just... felt so... liberating, to know that tomorrow you’d wake up and you wouldn’t have to see your family.  And not the day after.  And not the day after that either.  And never, ever again.

It feels so good that you buy the guitar, the Gibson Goldtop, you just straight up blow several hundred on that sucker cuz it just feels so _right._  It feels so good that it doesn’t even sting when you realise the bus has left without you.  Cuz... that oughta be fine too.  You used to hitchhike between towns in Wisconsin, and you can do it here, too.  Easy.  The first trucker is a lewd son of a bitch, but your ignorance and propensity to just laugh off his creeping gets you out alive.  You didn’t think it then, just kinda got grossed out at the sound the wackin’ makes, y’know, and you just dropped out of the truck at an overnight park and start hitching again, but not before stealing his Flamin’ Groovies cassette.

This one’s called _[Headin For The Texas Boarder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0b4Ga5WQkw)_ , then, and there are two cars after the trucker with hairy palms and no changes of clothes in between.  One’s a wealthy hippie couple nostalgic for their youth; they give you a joint and talk about that perfect dream, _L.A._ , in such beautiful ways, about the squats and the communes and the drugs and the art and shit, you taking note of the names – the streets – the places you’ll need once you get there.  One is a middle-aged dude who’s driving down for his father’s funeral, and he’s not as much fun but you get some quality sleep in the backseat, your arms wrapped around your guitar.

The last leg you hitch a ride with this dude, you know, you think he was an air-conditioning repairman or something.  And he was nice, in his late 20s maybe, he liked good music like Crüe and Whitesnake.  And yeah, so it was good, and safe, and nothing really happening, and the guitar is on the floor of the backseat and you go to sleep.  And when you wake up the car has stopped and this guy is pinning you down and has your jeans halfway down your legs and is about to stick his dick in you, and you freak the _shit_ out on him in a way you coulda never predicted, y’know, you coulda never planned.  And it ends with your palm in his nose and your foot in his gut, and punching his face again and again with the window rattling under the back of his head, and blood speckled on the glass and on your knuckles.  And he can’t even move.  And you’re pulling your jeans up, sat on your ass on the seat, screaming through mad tears at his bloody, crushed in face, _Don't_ ever _touch me! Don't ever_ think _about touching me! Don't touch yourself and_ think _about me!  Nothing!_ and you grab the guitar and your bag and bang, you’re outta there.

After that shit, another truck seemed like nothing.  There were barely hours before L.A. but you don’t even remember them, but you do, but you don’t – you remember staring out the window and finding a smudge of blood still on your knuckle, but not what was said to you by the black truckdriver at all.  It was weird, cuz it was like... for the first time in your life, you knew where you were, y’know?  And that was far from home and totally, totally alone.  With no money and nowhere to go.  And someone just tried to rape you – examining your fingers, the blood caked in around the chewed-back nail vacantly – and yeah, you got away, you beat the fucker almost to death.  But like.  What if you aren’t so lucky, another time?  What if that monster doesn’t come save you.  It’s not like it comes when it’s called, usually it just fucking eats your insides, y’know, chewing in there, just below the surface.  And now you’re all alone, almost in this huge city full of drugs and guns and prostitutes, and you can _never_ go back.

When you drop out of the cab that night just outside the depot, slinging your guitar after you, the driver smiles down at you through the dark and says, _Welcome to the jungle, baby.  You’re gonna die._  

And you are.

You find one of the streets the hippies told you about, and it doesn’t take long to find the squat.  I mean, you could smell it down the fucking hill.  The building is dark and reeks of rotting food, sweat, piss, faecal matter, drywall punched down for a quick exit, broken windows, the decaying belly of Hollywood.  What was meant to be a dream is instead packs of sharp, violent eyes that watch you as you find a place to sit amongst fucking needles and the harrowed coughs of perishing youths, clutching your guitar to you.

You don’t sleep at all in fact until you form an uneasy alliance with a couple of older punks in there a few days later, and they like the Dead Boys, and this song is called _[Big City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xujham1ruCY)_ , a Stones cover, and they understand how important a guy’s guitar is to him – though they don’t understand that you’re a guy, calling you _sweetie_ and _ginger cunt_ between cocky looks up your body hidden in your loose t-shirt, your leather jacket.  _You look real hot in your tight blue jeans._  The last of the whiskey goes to put you out, sleeping on a rotting mattress with your legs wrapped around the Gibson and woken constantly by the hunger clawing at your stomach and the monster bubbling up like black tar through your dreams.  But they don’t touch you.  When you tell one of the boys about the whole rape thing, he brushes it off like nothing.  Like they’ve all been through it.  And maybe that’s comforting, and maybe that’s terrifying.  And maybe you’re starving to death.

The boys say, _Little girl, if you’re starving then you better make some money, huh._ They take you out to street vendors and buy food with money they’ve magicked from somewhere, and they share it with their girlfriends, but they won’t let you have any of it cos you’re not bringing in any money, y’know.  You try busking, but the Gibson sounds like shit without an amp – rattling steel strings, rusty from their time in the pawn shop, and they cut up your fingers to play.  Can’t sell drugs without an investment to start with, and the first pocket you clumsily attempt to pick gets your head punched by the angry victim, an otherwise dapper looking man who chases you down the street until you run into traffic.  They're more vicious in L.A., they're more protective.  Your small town skills just aren't gonna cut it.  Begging doesn’t bring in more than pocket change, not looking like you do – in your leather jacket and grubby jeans, wearing holes in your boots, your ginger hair stiff with grime, guitar bag slung on your back.  You barely starve off the booze withdrawals with the stolen dregs of cans and glasses outside bars, swallowing spit.  But washback can only get you so far.  This was L.A., you were meant to be going to gigs and being a rockstar with your guitar, y’know.  To do that, you need money.  And you start searching.

This song is called _[Café Avenue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho1AfERF_O4)_  and it’s by your favourite band back then, Hanoi Rocks.  Well, guess it’s called _Self Destruction Blues_ for a reason – the only good thing about the hunger was that it was so fucking bad that it kept the monster at bay, and your scars had a chance to fade from red to pink.  The oldest boys in the gang, if you could call it that, sell brown Persian heroin and that is why there are holes in the walls – so when the police come, they can run.  Some of them turn tricks.  All of the girls turn tricks.  And you think about the money, and food, and booze, and the Boulevard at night, and Michael Monroe, and how it’s getting hard to carry your guitar you’re getting so weak from hunger, and how you can’t remember if it was two weeks since you got here or two months.

And it seems pretty, uh, glamorous, out there, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else, y’know, these girls called _Lani_ and _Jackie_ , and they’ve all been raped and abused and worse than you anyway.  So you’re just being a fucking baby, and they call you that, _baby._  This is it, y’know, this is _rock ‘n’ roll_.  Runaways.  This is the real life, the real world, this is what you wanted, and one day you promise yourself you’ll write a really good song about it.  So you go out there and you just do it, for twenty fucking dollars, behind some fucking bins in an alley behind a club.  You don’t know if the dude thinks you’re a boy or a girl and frankly at that point, you don’t even care, cuz he gives you twenty bucks for it, and the bottle of Mad Dog you score with it washes out the taste anyway, shudders back those withdrawals, silences the monster.  And from there maybe it’s a Persephone thing, y’know.  You can’t go back.

Cash goes fast, it slips out of your fingers.  Every time you think you will just turn this one and then work out what to do next, it’s barely two days before you’re broke again.  Dunno how that happens; with every tenner you make you’re back carefree and partying, getting kicked out of clubs, dancing in the streets with the other youth, dodging gang members, cutting up your fingers on the guitar.  But the clubs boast a door fee, and older kids ask for commission to buy you booze on their fake IDs – and the money goes.  

The nights are getting cooler.  Your youth is exploitable, you can ask for more cash, you realise; you can do things like slip into people’s cars if you split it with one of the boys keeping an eye on the situation from outside, you can make a tight sixty bucks like that to spend on booze and be smashed for the next lot, and not have to remember your brother telling you this was how it’d end.  You can buy makeup, and Lani can show you how to black up your eyes like Nikki from the Crüe.  You can buy a switchblade from a pawn shop to protect yourself.  You can kiss a girl called Micky in the squat, and her lips are so sweet and cut up, and you sleep together that once holding hands while she tells you all about her fucked up family, her dad a pornographer, her mother a junkie now in the ground.  There’s a lyric – _thought you could lick it, now you can’t kick it._  But it is the money, not the sex – even though maybe you’re learning, you mostly just stay still and let it happen, and then tear it from your memory to throw yourself back into the gang.  You’re happier sleeping with Micky than you ever are on the streets, even though she sneers at you and calls you a lesbian whore the next day.  You are learning that you cannot trust anyone.  You’re becoming streetwise fast.

All the same it’s only a matter of weeks before the party comes to a screeching halt – you hear some rentboys on the corner talking about going home with older faggots and being paid just to let them watch, and having a roof over their heads and all, and that sounds mighty nice at this point, when you haven’t washed except out of a bucket of cold water for two months.  Wisconsin seems a very, very long way away, and not just because, uh, it is.  So when your opportunity comes up in the shape of a pushy and persistent john, you think you really could use a shower.  You really could see yourself on a proper mattress, y’know, not one where you just have to pretend you can’t see the blood stains.  You really could go for a motel room.  Soap.  Kissing a nice man (and kissing is nice), who seems to believe you when you tell him you’re a boy, and so why shouldn’t faggot rules apply to you? 

But once you get up there he doesn’t just want to look, and nothing you can say persuades him off you.  Not a real boy, like?  Oh, he knows.  Underage?  That’s just hotter, that’s what everyone’s looking for these days.  First time?  He’s surprised, impressed, he doesn’t believe you, and then your anxiety gives you away – for that, he’ll sweet talk you, he’ll be gentle, he’ll pay you just to eat your cunt – sh-shit, that’s a lot of money, actually, enough that it makes you choke.  Enough for booze, enough for food, maybe enough for a ticket to see the Crüe play at the Forum next week.  So you let it happen, you take his money and then let him undress you and touch you and the last thing you really feel is his tongue push in, slippery and vile, before you disconnect from yourself.

His thick and rough fingers are so far from the tentative investigations of teenage girls, and it hurts.  You thought this was supposed to be a fun thing, someone doing this, but it just feels gross, you feel tight and anxious, and nothing is happening, not like when you’re alone.  (Nothing will happen, even on your own, not for a year after this with a groupie, and nothing will happen with Tony, the first man you let touch you down there after this, but you’ll be too fucked up to care.)  He tells you he’s convinced you’re a virgin because he can taste it, and then he offers you money.  A lot of money, in cash.  Maybe enough to last you weeks on the vodka, on the night train.  To drop on drugs and get into dealing.  To follow the Crüe from city to city, to get a chance to meet them.  Maybe even enough left over to buy a busking amp, or an acoustic guitar.  Maybe even enough to convince you not to care.  

But you don’t remember much of it, none of the sweet talk, none of the gentleness, only like, the taste of your cunt on his mouth, his hands holding your wrists together above your head because you are so paralysed and dead fish, then nothing.  Like you blacked out, like someone cut it all out of you with a pair of scissors, and then you’re suddenly coming to standing in the shower, like you were conscious and moving the whole time just not... in your body.  Like your monster decided to protect you again, by spiriting you out of there while the bad shit happened.  And it hurts bad, a gnawing, raw ache, a strangled throat from where the monster inside you wrings it tight, a feeling of being used, even with the hot shower.  Like you are the whore your mother said you were.

The money should last you, and you swear it’s gonna and shove it into your pants for safekeeping, retrieving your guitar on the way out, promising yourself you ain’t never gonna do _that_ again.  But sure enough you’re back out there the very next night, aching, just cuz the other kids are all out there too, and they like you when you’re like this, on their level, and you’re thinking of the next dollar, and the Crüe gigs, man, seeing Nikki in the flesh, and how maybe you can go to a local gig tomorrow night.  Buy that amp.  Maybe some new strings.  Yeah, and some cassettes too, batteries for your walkman.  Go busking.  Turn it all around.  Reach those lights.

You were just talking to an older hooker called Vera, who is gorgeous but too old for you, over here and sharing a cigarette when the next thing you know you turn around and there’s no one on the street.  None of your kind, your pack, anyway.  You turn the corner looking for them and there’s a police car waiting there with the window down and the cop is looking at you like he wants you to go over, _if you know what I mean_.  It’s late.  He looks to be alone.  You think that’d be funny, a story to tell, to suck off a cop.  So you drop your cigarette, butt it out, and wander over to have a chat with him.

When he asks, you tell him you’re sixteen, _officer_.  He asks where you’re from, so you tell him.   _Long way from home_ , he says.   _Hell yeah I am._  He asks you your name and you tell him _Pickles._   _Right._ You make a gross joke and he chuckles at it.   _Sure, but what’s your real name?_  And it seems to be going just fine until his partner grabs you by the back of your jacket and shoves you against the side of the car.  You see, you are a fucking idiot when you are sixteen, and while you won’t fully realise how fucking dumb you were until you’re twenty-five, you’re realising it particularly acutely being pinned to a police car.  You’re pitching a fit then and _don’t fuck with my guitar!_ as he pushes you over the bonnet and snatches up your wrists, reciting your rights.  Then the first cop is out of the car and the next thing you feel is the bite of the cuffs at your wrists.   _Fuck!  What the fuck!  What the fuck am I being arrested for!_

 _Prostitution is a crime in California.  Didn’t you know that, sweetie?_   You say _no_ , but really you just didn’t care.  Then you change your mind and tell them you’re not a prostitute anyway and try to kick their shins.  They avoid you easily and inform you that due to reforms, it’s now enough just to be on the Boulevard and underage, that they can take you into custody for your own protection.  And based on what you said to Officer Kelly here, the fake name, the lewd jokes, and hanging around with a woman they know to be a criminal just before, you definitely are turning tricks, so they’re arresting you under PC 653.22 – loitering with intent to commit prostitution.

They ask where your parents are, and you make no sound, your face pressed against the cold metal of the police car bonnet.  They ask you where your pimp is, and you turn your head and fucking spit at them.  You don’t have a fucking pimp, you do it all _yourself – oh, shit._  That was a mistake.  So they chuck you in the car and the next thing you know you’re in one of those shitty empty rooms, exactly the same as on TV, nicer than the ones in Lincoln County, and kicking your legs where you sit handcuffed on a hard-backed school chair and wait to be interviewed.

This song is _[Jail Guitar Doors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVZKRT2zGk)_  by the Clash.  And you can’t go to jail.  You’ll miss the fucking Crüe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In progress, always appreciate the comments.
> 
> This has been a heavy fic to write so I can only imagine it is to read. Here are some links if you need the support (all USA, I'm afraid, as I note the majority of my audience is American). Please don't feel afraid to ask for help, you matter.
> 
> [24/7 National Suicide Prevention Helpline](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)  
> [24/7 Lifeline Chat](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/)  
> [18/7 Trans Lifeline](https://www.translifeline.org/)  
> [Resources For Surviors of Sexual Assault and Their Loved Ones (inc. hotlines) (RAINN)](https://www.rainn.org/national-resources-sexual-assault-survivors-and-their-loved-ones)  
> [Human Trafficking Hotline](https://humantraffickinghotline.org/)


	3. Dead End Justice

Officer Kelly is a patient man and he explains to you that yes, you’re being charged.  Not with prostitution, though he could probably push that on you if he liked, just loitering with intent to commit prostitution.  In the State of California it doesn’t matter that you’re sixteen (and it's illegal for you to have sex), it’s still prostitution and that’s gonna show on your record.  But you _are_ young, and you’re Irish like he is, and – maybe you don’t know this, but lately there’s been additional funding due to campaigning against _survival sex_ , they call it, and – you tune him out, staring into the light bulb above you.  If your mom is told about this, she will probably come to Los Angeles and kill you herself, like some kinda harpy jetting in from the sky.  So when Officer Kelly asks about her again, you tell him you don’t have any parents.

He offers you a reduced penalty if you can tell him who made you do this, but no one made you do this.  No one person, anyway.  You kinda just had to.  Like, society, _man_.  There was nowhere to go and nothing to do and you were too small to rob and and and, uh.  It’s just kinda like that.  On the streets, y’know.  You say, having lived on the streets for what, two months maximum.   _Well, that’s a shame, darling,_ says Officer Kelly.  Here’s the facts:

You’re being charged with the misdemeanour _loitering with intent to commit prostitution_ , which carries with it a maximum sentence of six months, and a maximum fine of a thousand dollars.

This is a first offence.

You’re not being fined.

You’re not going to juvie.

You’re not going to jail either.

And you’re eyeing him at this point, black eyed like a snake.  Your body still hurts.  _What’s the catch._  You want to go back to the squat and cry with Micky about how unfair it is, how broken your dreams are.   _What’s the catch, huh._  The catch is – well, you’re a child.  And you get ready to spit in his face for calling you that, and Officer Kelly holds up his notepad to shield himself, so – caught out – you roll it back in your mouth.  If you don’t tell them where your family is, then they’re holding you in custody.  You repeat that you don’t have a family, and Kelly tells you he doesn’t believe you.  You’re not a street kid, your nails are still straight, your teeth.  You don’t talk like a street kid, even though you try; you’ve had an education.  Your clothes are expensive and have lasted a long time; the street kids have no money, and their cheap clothes fall apart in weeks.  They took your bags to search and while they didn’t find drugs, they did find booze and a Gibson guitar.  Any street kid would have already pawned that, so you can’t have been out here long.  You just glare at him.

Well, if you don’t tell them where your family is then you’ll stay in custody until they can place you in a foster home.  Because you’re clearly intelligent.  Officer Kelly suspects you were only turning tricks, only living on the streets, because you thought it was cool like all these rock stars on these cassettes they found in your bag – meaning you’re an idiot, and wilfully so – and so you’re not beyond saving.  They’re going to hold you in the cells until they find a place to put you for the meantime, since they can only hold you for a few days by law, as a juvenile.  You are non-responsive by this point, just staring at him in pure hatred.  Because you didn’t come all the way to L.A. just to be put in another home, another abusive family, another round of therapy.  It doesn’t work.  It doesn’t _work._  

All right.  Well.  That’s it.  You spend the night in a cell alone and don’t sleep.  The alcohol leaves you, your head throbbing, and your body hurts, and it twinges in on itself every time you hear one of the men in the cells yell out some lewd shit like they yelled at you when the officers walked you down.   _Jailbait._  That’s a song by [Motörhead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzdK8yd45uA).  And a song by [Aerosmith](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm2PWJiqBlE).  And suddenly just thinking about it makes you feel so sick, so full-body, tremors sick, a type of sick you haven’t felt since your brother’s friends – since – like you wanna rip your organs straight out of your body, dig your hands into your abdomen and pull 'em out in bloody handfuls.

It’s not... funny anymore.  It’s not _fun_ anymore.  Yeah, this is a song called _[Ain’t It Fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oaXNXw_Gaw)_  by the Dead Boys, and it’s the realisation that, weeping into the knees of your jeans in the corner of your cell, you got a choice now.  You got the system, where there’s no escape, where people are gonna rape and abuse you and you gotta be a good girl and shut up about it, where you’re gonna be forced into a marriage, where you’re gonna have to be a fucking slave to men like that.  Where there’s therapists who are gonna put their hands into your bad, bad history and tell you to just get the fuck over it.  Where you’re gonna be forced to be normal, to pretend to be normal, to pretend there’s nothing wrong.  Where they’re gonna kill you and say that you liked it.  Or you got the streets, where there’s nothing but being fucked for money and spending it on shit that’ll kill the pain.  And it hurts more but at least you got to choose it.  At least you got to scream.

(Decades later, in the clean office of the band therapist in a private session and eyeing his arms, forced there by the manager, you’ll have your legs crossed and your hands laced together resting over your knee, and the therapist will say, after you try to scare him outta ‘rock talk’ by telling him that shit, _Y’know, I’m just thinkin’, you got that song, Rocket Bitch – is that right?_ _And I know you’ve said it was written for someone else, now I know, I read that.  But they say all art is an autobiography, right?  You follow me Pickles?  And I know you said that no one ever_ did _anything to you, we covered that.  Yeah.  But I’m just sayin’_ – leaning back in his chair and clicking that damn pen – _that maybe, when you’re a teenager locked in a room or a car with an older man, and someone who has money and you have none, I mean, do you have the power?  Could you say no, in that situation?  If you had said no, what coulda happened?  Well, I guess what I’m getting at is, have you thought about that, uh, that maybe, you reacted like that, like you were, uh, raped, because you, uh, you were, raped.  Have you thought of that?_  And you’ll look dead into his eyes and smile gently, your face sliding into a soulless, hollow look, and you’ll say, _I changed my mind, doc.  Turns out, I don’t wanna rock talk no more._ )

A day later you’re taken in a car in handcuffs to one of these youth shelters, and given a room to share with a bed.  And a window.  With blinds.  It’s clean.  There’s a little basket to put your stuff in at the end of the bed.  Ugly clean clothes while they wash yours, but you fought tooth and nail for your boots (and the switchblade hidden inside one of them).  Soap.  Food.  The girl you’re sharing your room with – actually, she _is_ called Cherie – immediately hates your fucking guts, calls you a delusional lesbian when you tell her you’re a boy.  She’s pregnant, she tells you her boyfriend, kinda, sorta, well he is her boyfriend because he was before he brought her to L.A. and got her out on the streets, knocked her up.  Well, she doesn’t know that for sure since it could have been anyone she had sex with, but she says it’s his anyway, it’s gonna be a _love baby,_ but you wouldn’t understand that because you’re a fucking homo.  You curl your lip in disgust and fear, and really, you’re kinda glad that she hates you. 

A racing thought follows her, that actually it’s been a couple of months since you’ve had a bleed, and it lacerates your brain and leaves your mind blank with panic.  You don’t protest at dinner, you just eat, in a hall with other fucked up children, some much younger than you, and afterwards you vomit it up and you don’t know why, but you’ve started shaking too, all over, trembling.  You can’t think, can’t think nothing except _you gotta get out_.  And you gotta get out now, before they put you with some more abusive creeps – I mean, at least you knew what Calvert and Seth were gonna do.  But there’s high fences and guards watching you constantly, a splitting headache.  And Cherie watching you too.  When your folks put you in that horrible place, it was just a matter of starving yourself to get back to a place you could predict.  Here there’s no such escape.  You’re already starved.  There’s no one to go back to.  There is no escape. 

God, the damn thing still aches.  Your head feels like it’s been hit with a hammer.  You can hear the other kids, talking through the walls.

You curl up in bed that night and hold yourself.  The little sleep you get is interrupted by Cherie crying or the nightmares you have, like the walls are melting down around you, a booming sense of doom that echoes throughout the halls.  Another day passes brainless and trapped, again you upchuck your food.  You can’t get out.  You can’t _get out_.  You’re curled up in a little ball under your cotton sheets again, knowing tomorrow you might be back in hell, crying silently into your pillow when you hear Cherie whisper across the room.

_Hey, Carrot Top.  You’re in here for hustlin’, right._

You give a strained, sad sound in response, but don’t really tell her yes or no.

_Let’s break out tonight._

You turn your head to look at her through the dark.  You can barely see her hand reaching for you, her face bordered by the white cotton sheets.

_My guy is gonna be waiting outside in a van, we worked this out.  He’s a real gentleman, he won’t mind if you come.  Grab what you need.  I’m gonna run for the gate, you should come with._

_Why are ya doing this?_ you whisper, but you’re already moving to get out of bed and change into your now-cleaned clothes.  You wanna see the Crüe, man.

_We dead end kids gotta stick together, Carrots.  And I dunno about you, but I just gotta be free._

You’ve never heard truer, sweeter words.  You dress quickly and sling your guitar over your shoulder, take the switchblade in hand and hide it in your pocket.  Cherie is dressed too, her sudden change of heart unfathomable.  She takes your free hand and holds it, and you feel briefly in love with her as she leads you silently through the halls into the bathroom and hikes open a window.  This isn’t her first rodeo, she tells you, and gets you to lift her up to the window so that she can slip out.  You can scramble up after since you’re not – probably not – in her condition, and you agree on proviso that she takes your guitar when you hand it through to her. 

You hear her feet hit on the soft earth of the garden on the other side, and the hollow thump sounds so loud in your aching head, and then you pass the guitar through the window to feel it taken in her hands and lowered safely to the ground.  You follow, climbing up the wall with your boots marking the plaster, and drop to the ground beside her, getting stiffly up again.  Silently, she points to the gates on the other side of the grass yard, and indicates with a finger across her throat that if you make a sound you’re fucking dead.  You look at the gates.  There’s a silver van on the other side of them, idling across the street, its brake lights glowing.  Does she seriously expect to climb that fence, pregnant?  And then it occurs to you.  No.  She doesn’t.  She expects you to climb over, to run to the van and alert her boyfriend.  And then spring it, open it from the other side.

Okay.  You take her hand and look into her eyes, giving her a decisive nod.  And then you run.

Your bootsteps spring off the dewy grass, hand in hand with this girl, practically a stranger but right now she’s your blood sister.  A male shout cuts through the night, a flash of a torch, and the security is already on your tail.  Your heart is racing.  The fence is getting closer.  You can make it.  You’ve just got to get over—

Your hand jerks back as Cherie falls to the grass.  _Cherie!_ you shout, trying to pull her up, but she is struggling – has struggled the whole way. 

 _Carrots!  You gotta get over!_   _You gotta go get him!_

You stand between the fence and Cherie, staring at her, staring at the guards running for you, staring at the gate, staring at her.

 _CARROTS. GET OVER THE GOD DAMN GATE, YOU FUCKING BITCH!_ howls Cherie, and you turn immediately as though a firework has been set off at your feet and throw yourself at the wire grid, clinging to it with your fingers as you try to pull yourself up it.  The torches chase all across your back, casting your shadow onto the street outside as the guards close in – as Cherie screams behind you.  You fix your eyes on the van, which has stopped idling now and turned off.  A white man in a big, fleece-collared overcoat and loafers gets out, alerted by the panic and lights, and jogs over to the fence. 

 _Hey there, Strawberry!  Over here!  C’mon, kiddo!_ he calls to you, and as you take him in – his age, his nice clothes, his wristwatch, the gun down his trouser waistband – in the bright dancing whites of the flashlights it’s instantly obvious to you that he’s a pimp.  You freeze on the fence, stuck there like a frightened cat.  The life you face over the fence is staring you in the eyes, the life you face if you stay is getting ready to drag you back down.  And you can’t move at all.

Someone grabs you by your leather jacket and hauls you off, the wire cutting into your curled fingers until they pop off one by one and you fall bodily onto the guard.  There are male hands around you and you thrash in them, screaming about your guitar which falls to the ground beside you, slipped off your shoulder.  You put your hand in his face, you kick and scream, you hear the pimp yelp, _Holy shit! You’re on your own, kid!_ and his fleeing footsteps, and the screech of his tyres as he abandons you.  You claw your nails into the security guard’s throat and he throws you off onto the grass, joined by the other men as the flashlights blind you.  One of them already has Cherie, pulling her away from you as she howls out to the night, trapped again.

This is a song called  _[Beat on the Brat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvkzQmc68Y)_  and it’s by the Ramones, a real classic, and suddenly you’re full of it, full to the brim, with life, with rage.  Rolling on the grass means you can get your hand into your pocket, crawling beneath their lights and shadows, your head pounding, and as soon as guard grabs you by your collar, the blade has jumped from your fingers and you’ve stabbed it into his wrist.  There’s blood, sprayed hot across your neck from his hand.  Yelling.  _Bitch has a knife!_   You’re blinded by the flashlights, you just flail the knife towards them and hope that you cut a finger, a palm, a cheek. 

The full weight of a man hits you and winds you onto the ground, but mindlessly you plunge the knife into his thigh and pull it out.  A fist hits your face as the blood pours from his leg and drips hot over the knee of your jeans.  Someone stomps on your free hand, flailing over the grass for escape, and a horrific, tearing pain blooms up from under the boot.  You lie on the grass beneath him, your blood filling your mouth, the knife held tight in your red fist, and you scream in his fucking face and shove the knife into his gut.  And then he punches your fucking lights out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In progress, always appreciate the comments.
> 
> This has been a heavy fic to write so I can only imagine it is to read. Here are some links if you need the support (all USA, I'm afraid, as I note the majority of my audience is American). Please don't feel afraid to ask for help, you matter.
> 
> [24/7 National Suicide Prevention Helpline](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)  
> [24/7 Lifeline Chat](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/)  
> [18/7 Trans Lifeline](https://www.translifeline.org/)  
> [Resources For Surviors of Sexual Assault and Their Loved Ones (inc. hotlines) (RAINN)](https://www.rainn.org/national-resources-sexual-assault-survivors-and-their-loved-ones)  
> [Human Trafficking Hotline](https://humantraffickinghotline.org/)


	4. Poor Little Rich Girl

You don’t wake up except in bolts.  Perhaps it’s the surrender, carrying you under, three nights with no sleep, carried now in a security guard’s arms – the night above you.  Then the hall ceiling.  The roof of a car.  Then bright lights that wake you, gasping, with a stretcher beneath your back. 

This is _[Comfortably Numb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrOQC-zEog) _ by Pink Floyd, and you praying that you’re not gonna die.  Reckon you only have a few of your nine lives left, y’know.  You’re in a hospital emergency room with people talking at you and over you, but you don’t remember much of it – a nurse asking your name and age, being left in a stall with a robe to change into and staggering out once you have, unsure of where you are again, being made to stand on a scale and the numbers swimming in front of you.  94... 101... 97... _when was your last period?_ Nurse’s mouth moving, _concussion, DT – such a shame in someone so young – malnutrition.  That’s probably why you haven’t had that period, hmm, dear?_   Your fingers, beating pain, hot pain, splints.  As soon as you’re in a bed, pills swallowed, you’re asleep, exhausted.  Slaughtered.  So relieved to hear someone tell you that you’re not pregnant, you sleep like the fucking dead.  You don’t even care what _is_ wrong.

You wake up to sunshine and voices.  Too bright.  The voices are kind, but they aren’t talking to you.  There’s a curtain drawn around your hospital bed and the kind adults are talking to someone else.  They are worried about her and hope she can come home soon.  They hope she doesn’t miss too much homework.  You think maybe you have died and you’re in heaven, listening to your parents talking to another you who was just okay with what she was.  They’ve brought her cassette player so she has something nice to listen to.  Most of all, they want her to know that they love her.  She says she knows, she loves them too.  And then you see your hand, and maybe it would be better if you were dead.

Then you’re sitting there, not two feet from this happy family, staring at your right hand wrapped up in plaster and splints down the fingers in horror.  The fingers left bare, your index and middle, are swollen and purple and you can’t move them for the stiffness and pain.  The fucker broke them.  The fucker stood on your hand and he’s broken them all.  They’ve beaten you so badly they’ve humiliated themselves and put you in hospital to atone for it, a custodian of the state.  Oh, my god.  Without even thinking it the tears are welling hot.  What if they don’t heal right?  What if you can’t play guitar properly again?  They’ve fucking taken it from you, your dream.  They’ve kicked and stomped it straight into the kerb.  You may as well be dead. 

Los Angeles has killed you, and you are dead.

You wipe at your tears with your other fist, grazed and stiff, the taste of old blood on your teeth.  _Oh,_ just listen to them, _darling, you know we love you and we’re here for you, we’re here to support you in your studies.  These lovely people will take care of you, all the nurses and doctors..._ it’s sickening and it makes you sick.  _Paris,_ they say, _business trip._   You’re lying back on the pillow and you can see the wall is patterned like the Eiffel tower.  Like you’re looking at it from above.  That’s cool.  These shapes kinda come out of the white wall towards you... like they’re pushing into the tiles, pulsing.  You put your hand out but you can’t touch them.  The voices go on behind you, your head beats badly, and the sun bounces off the shapes on the white walls in pink and green.  It looks like a time your friend Chris gave you a tab of LSD at this house gig in Milwaukee, and it was like you couldn’t hear it at all – you just lay on the couch in the basement and stared at the shapes on the roof.  Except this time you also feel sick, and your head hurts, and there’s a feeling tight in your chest that you can’t describe – like doom, but not quite – like being dead already.  If you are dead, then at least it’s pretty.

You can’t remember falling asleep after the nurse gave you some pills to swallow, but suddenly you’re waking up and the room is darker.  Someone jerked aside the curtain just then and let it fall back, and the steel rings that hold it in place rattle softly as bare footsteps cross the floor between you and climb back into bed.  You look up at the rings, feeling like your body has been sewn to the bed, and start to slip under again.  Whenever your eyes close (heavy, dead) there are shapes, when you press your unbound fingers against your bruised eyelid or try to flex the other one, those shapes double and turn and start to float towards you, endless fractals.  It’s very beautiful.  In the back of your mind you hear a song and think you must be hallucinating.  Because this song is [_Underwater World_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpFB-9RrmT8) by your favourite band in the whole entire universe at that point in time – yeah, Hanoi Rocks.  And there’s no way you can really be hearing it.

 _Welcome to the ocean, welcome to the sea, yeah yeah._   You can move your mouth along with it, staring up at the ceiling.  _Welcome to the jungle_... and your eyes open wide despite the pain that makes red fractals dance across your vision.  It’s gotta be a hallucination.  Fuck.  You’ve heard stories of this – _the horrors_ – but before you can finish the thought, you’ve straight passed out again.  When you wake again it’s still in the dark and with a desperately full bladder.  Pretty sure you don’t have a catheter, so you guess you’re supposed to work this out for yourself – or wet the bed, which is tempting, but you’re kinda enjoying being clean for once.  The music is still playing in your head, the same album, and you try to just ignore it and snatch the curtains aside as you swing your legs out of bed.

You’re looking straight into the eyes of a blonde teenage girl in the bed opposite you, sitting up on her bed and staring back at you in shock.  This song is _Million Miles Away_ and it’s also by Hanoi Rocks, and it’s coming out of a tiny cassette player that she’s got sitting on her lap, like the type journalists use to record interviews with the built in speaker.  She had it playing very softly, but seeing you staring at her, she hits the off button with a click and shrinks back behind her curtain.  _Sorry._

 _Uhhh... that’s... okay._   Your voice sounds surreal to you as you drop to the floor, the linoleum cool under your bare feet.  You have to hold the bed to stay upright.  _They’re a good band, dude... I mean, babe..._ _is there a can round this joint somewhere...?  Think I got the... the horrors, y’know._

 _Uh huh..._ She doesn’t, but she points, and you find it, wobbling around to the door because your leg has gone to sleep and everything in your body fucking hurts.  This is the silence of sitting on the can in a tiny hospital toilet, listening to your hot, stinging piss, a feeling like spiny beetle legs crawling over your scarred arms and thighs, wondering what you did to deserve only a double room – wondering what this chick did to deserve being in a room with _you._   The truth is probably just a bed shortage, or that you happened to be shoved into one of the posher shelters to begin with based on the police’s observations and luck and the threat of angry parents somewhere out there ready to rain down on you. 

You try to check the bowl for blood afterwards but the acrid smell makes a great bloom of blackness shoot through your vision and then it’s crammed with spots, swimming, and you’re crushed on your knees on the floor and vomiting acid into the bowl.  When it stops and the spots just wiggling over your eyes, you drink what feels like your own body weight in water from the tap, and then stagger back to bed, hauling yourself back in.  The girl is just sitting there, her face obscured by the curtain around her bed.  You are flickering in and out of consciousness, the spots overtaking you, when she says, _um, can I ask you a question?_ and her sweet voice chases all the spots away, clearing your vision, hiding behind your eyeballs instead.

The suddenness of it takes you aback.  _Um, yeah,_ you say, your jaw stiff from the punch that took you out just the night before.  What could she ask?  Like what are you in for, or...

_What’s your name?_

_Pickles,_ you tell her, and you think you almost hear her scoff.  _Really,_ you follow up, looking sideways at the cut of her form obscured by the curtain.

 _Pickles?!_ she asks, and suddenly jerks it aside to look at you properly.  In the cold blue light of the night ward, she looks manic, like some kind of sea creature, her blonde hair silvery, her blue eyes black.  You have no idea how you look – mad and ugly, beaten up, your face swollen and scratched, your hair in its feral, tangled mullet stiff with sweat and cigarette smoke and city exhaust, hanging in drab clumps around your face and neck.  _Pickles!  Are you for real?_

 _Yeah, I’m for real,_ you mumble back, and she laughs at you.  There’s something about the way she’s laughing in her little rich girl voice that doesn’t hurt you, that tugs a smile to your own split lips.  It’s been so long since you’ve heard someone laughing and it not be bitter and wounded, not out to wound someone else.  It’s only hearing it now that you realise how long it’s been absent from your life.  Since Wisconsin.  Since your last girlfriend, the one you lost after she drove Calvert’s car into a ditch because she panicked when the police tried to pull you over.  So before that too, before the panic.  That was... almost six months.  Maybe longer, you’ve lost track now.  Has it been two months in L.A. or two weeks?  Six weeks or six months?  Or six years?  Or six days?  But it sounds lovely, it really does.  You could have died, and gone to heaven.  You’d believe that.  You wish it was true.

 _Pickles!_ she repeats to herself, giggling, and then points to herself.  _I’m Erin.  A far more sensible name I think you’ll agree._ And you roll your eyes, which makes you see fractals again.

_Ain’t very rock n roll though, right, babe..._

_And Pickles is?_   Excuse her, Pickles is _extremely_ rock n roll.  Girl doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  But she careens on anyway, straight into the worst question she could ask you:  _So are you a boy or a girl?  I thought if I asked I could work it out but – Pickles!_

The last thing you want to hear when you’re stuck in a room with someone for who knows how long, but then again, you quite like the way she says your name – she can keep on saying it, maybe, that would be nice.  _Boy,_ you say shortly, and she sighs at that answer as though she is angry.  Or pretending to be angry.  Not, in fact, angry at all.

 _Typical!  You know my parents say I’m meant to be in a private room too but here I am!  They shuffled me here from emergency you know.  My parents were sure you were a girl because they wouldn’t dare put me in a room with a boy, but see, I could tell._   She looks so sure of herself, tapping her nose to show you she’s going to keep your secret, whatever she thinks it is.  You watch her with such inane gladness in your heart, your unbound hand clutching at the covers.

 _How’d ya know?_ you ask, because you can’t help the temptation.  The validation.  She picks up her cassette player and waves it at you demonstratively.

 _You look just like Michael Monroe!_  

And that’s something no one’s ever said to you.  Beautiful, sure, endless beautifuls and pretties and strikings and lovelies, but never beautiful like a boy beautiful.  You look at your swollen fingers, purple in the dark, the haunting feeling of maybe never again tickling at your heart from behind, in near your spine. 

 _What’s wrong?_ asks Erin, frowning at you, the way you’re choking up, and you suppose you owe it to her.

 _God.  No.  I’m just, uh, cool, yeah, uh... it’s just... like, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,_ you say, in wonder at this girl, and she just laughs at you again.

You talk, in jerks – a few times that night, a few the next day, a few in the night again – between visits from her parents and passing out from you.  No one comes to visit you except nurses and the space is obvious, alienating, but talking to Erin helps.  When you wake up you are hostile to start with, trying to scare her with stories of prostitution and drugs – you make it sound like you were hustling for years instead of the two weeks maximum it actually was, like you were the most bent, fucked up junkie on the Avenue, chucked into maximum security for all the fucking dicks choked on, all the heroin you’ve fucking eaten (you are not very smart at this point, but neither is she so it’s harmless).  She is scared, her questions more hesitant, but within it is a certain amount of wonder. 

She learns your age, and she is sixteen too.  She learns you’re a musician when they bring your gear in and set it kindly against the end of the bed (a deep grief in you to see it, but a kick of opportunity), and she’s in love with that idea.  She wishes she could just run away, and you learn that she’s here because she got stressed out – supposedly academic burnout – and took a lot of pills, and she overdosed and it almost killed her.  They pumped her stomach and now here she is.  Her parents had to fly back from New York just to see her, because otherwise she was alone.  Used to have a nanny but now sometimes they just leave her to fend for herself.  It gets lonely.  _So... why don’t ya just..._ you say, not understanding, and she looks at you clear-eyed in the clinic sunlight and says _huh?_

 _Y’know, run away.  If you wanna.  Why don’tcha?  I mean, I did._   But she has no answer for you, except that she just _can’t_.

On the second night you are woken from a dream in a cold sweat, clutching at your sheets, the pain from your broken fingers bringing you out of another nightmare about _doomed_ and _rape_ and _entrapment,_ dark rooms and forms you can’t quite make out.   You realise, kinda all at once, that delaying making that choice was pointless if you were still gonna have to make it.  Now here you are with this girl and she is really great, for real.  But she is trapped too.  If you stay here, maybe you really will become her.  You need to get back on the streets, find a way out.  A band, freedom, independence.  Maybe it’ll hurt, but at least you’ll be in control.  And right now, there ain’t no guards watching you.  And you’re pretty sure you saw a fire exit on the way to see the nurse.

Erin wakes up when you’re getting dressed, a slow, painful and frustrating process with your cast.  _Um,_ she says through the dark, and you snap at her, _No._   _I don’t need no help._   _I’m fucking fine,_ before she can even make the words. 

 _That’s okay,_ she says sadly, sitting up on her bed.  _Are you, um..._

 _Runnin’ away.  Yeah.  Say a word and you’re dead._ You sling your guitar over your shoulder – sure it’s cracked, sure they’ve fucked it up just like they’ve fucked up your fingers – and you stare through her in rage.  It’s not something she’s done, just what she represents.  You feel so sad for her that it hurts, and the only way you know to deal with hurt is to be angry.  And you’re so angry, at everything that’s lead up to now.

When she says nothing, just watches you, you walk to the door with all the anger held in your hunched shoulders, and linger there a moment.  _I mean, I like you.  But you’re still dead._   She still says nothing.  You look up at her again, tossing your screwed up, bed-flat mullet over the collar of your leather jacket, and indicate to the door with your cast.  _You... gonna come with?_

She shakes her head shyly, and it’s fucking disappointing.  She’s a coward, for choosing that caged bird life over freedom.  You glare at her and shrug.  _Fine.  Have it your way,_ you mock, and hold up your cast hand stiffly as if you’re holding up a burger.  _Have it your way.  See you on the other side, sweetheart._

And you’ve only pushed open the door when her bare feet hit the lino and patter to your side, and she’s pushed up against your shoulder, cupping her hands around her mouth to whisper into your ear.  It’s an address, hastily shared, and then she kisses you on the cheek and says, _just in case,_ and runs back to bed.  You’re standing there, trembling, and you only cast a look back at her as you drift out the door again.  She’s sat in bed and gives you a tiny wave as the door closes on her.  And you know there’s no time to hesitate, the kiss burning on your cheekbone, and you’re out that fire escape like a fucking rat off a burning ship.

This song is _[Back From The Dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB0yJHEafOk)_  by the Adverts, as you hit the streets again, weaving between the cars and hypnotised by the lights of clubs in the distance, that light up the sky with an aura in L.A. which is so friendly and warm compared to the cold stars and black sky of Tomahawk, Wisconsin.  You feel electrified, like her kiss has been cut into your cheek, and you run full bolt to the squat, ready to be united with your fucked up little family again and tell them how you’re Michael Monroe, how you’re gonna be a rock star, yeah, you’ve got money, you've received a sign.  You are a boy, and you’re gonna rip this city in two.

But _Back From The Dead_ is a short song, and when you arrive at the squat you find that it’s totally empty.  The trash and syringes crunching under your boots as you pick through the dark rooms, abandoned.  There is no one here.  They’ve left you.  _Just like everyone_ – no.  Something must have happened, the police must have come – and when you get down to the Boulevard, there’s no one fucking there either, none of the usuals, and you’re standing there on the corner with your guitar staring into the street, all the cars going by, all the lights above you, the city chewing you up to spit you out.  Because even if you could bear to sell your girlness to someone, murder it like that, there’s no one here to buy it.

You wander until you are totally lost, until you are seeing spots against the dawn, and sleep in a bin that night.  It’s out the back of a club that had bottles around the door, and you drank the dregs of them before you saw it.  The posters on the club wall tell you that the Crüe has been and gone.  And the bin has a lid, which is as much protection as you can hope for – staring at it in the parking lot, feeling that crushing defeat, cuz here you are in Los Angeles and you’re the whore your mother said you were and the garbage your father told you to be.  But they’re not here, chanting yourself inside, _they’re not here, they’re not here_ , and you climb in anyway.  You fall asleep to a different chant, the address Erin whispered to you, your eyes shutting fast and sinking you through the garbage bags and bottles into your tarry nightmares again.  Your arms wrapped around your guitar.  Cockroaches crawling over your bare skin, but this time, they’re fucking real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In progress, always appreciate the comments.
> 
> This has been a heavy fic to write so I can only imagine it is to read. Here are some links if you need the support (all USA, I'm afraid, as I note the majority of my audience is American). Please don't feel afraid to ask for help, you matter.
> 
> [24/7 National Suicide Prevention Helpline](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)  
> [24/7 Lifeline Chat](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/)  
> [18/7 Trans Lifeline](https://www.translifeline.org/)  
> [Resources For Surviors of Sexual Assault and Their Loved Ones (inc. hotlines) (RAINN)](https://www.rainn.org/national-resources-sexual-assault-survivors-and-their-loved-ones)  
> [Human Trafficking Hotline](https://humantraffickinghotline.org/)


	5. Babylon's Burning

You are undisturbed all day, and wake only to male voices chatting outside, the sound of bottles being placed on the asphalt below.  Someone leaning on the bin.  You stay totally still where you lie, listening to their conversation.  It’s about whores, because somehow you can’t escape that side of life, but not what you’re used to – they’re laughing about the bar they’ve just been in, what a hole it is, a real den of depravity, and they’re teasing one of their number about his interest in a woman that they say, didn’t he realise?  Shoulders too broad, no cunt under her tights.  _You fucking fag._  

Someone says _AIDS_.  Someone says _tranny_.  But it’s all a joke, and your heart is beating so hard, and eventually they leave.  You lie there for another minute, staring at the lid of the bin.  You’ve never heard of someone like you before, not in real life – not outside a line in a song.  Even on the street – in the squat – you thought they would be in Los Angeles, you were so hopeful somewhere in the back of your heart – and you repeat Erin’s address to yourself, like it’s some kind of prayer.  And then you spring out of the bin, _knowing_ you have to find this woman.

You sprint around the building, back into the blinding lights, the bar neon, the burlesque joints and the porno stores, the headlights glazing past.  Standing there helplessly gazing at the lights, hypnotized again, you realise you’re in Santa Monica Boulevard.  You have no idea where the address on your lips is, but this sure ain’t it.  The bar is called the Swan, and all you see of it is the light and the fucking door as you’re running for it, and not the bouncer’s hand which hits you in the chest and shoves you back.  He is huge, a mountain in a suit glaring down at you, and you stagger back on the pavement opening your mouth to cuss him out when someone else speaks.

 _Slow down, honey.  Hell will wait,_ she says slowly in a thick Puerto Rican accent, and you think she’s a faggot at first until you flick your razorblades glare in her direction.  She’s a tall black woman in a big fluffy faux fur leopard print jacket and a short black skirt, a thick black belt cinching her waist around the jacket, sheer stockings and huge black pumps, rings on her fingers, a cigarette between red nails, her lips bright heavy red, her eyes heavy black, her thick hair around her shoulders.  She nods at the doorway, currently blocked by the bouncer.  _It’s twenty-one and over.  I’d ask for your ID, but I’d have to cut your umbilical cord before you could go in anyway._

You patted your jacket anyway, as if you have any ID, your eyes locked on her.  You look up at her helplessly, people on the street staring at the two of you as your bruised thumb strains on the strap of your guitar bag.  _What’s your name,_ you gulp up at her, and she frowns at you.

 _Solly._   _What’s it to you?_

You don’t know what it is to you.  A magic word.  You bite your fingers and look around, up at the bouncer, up at Solly again.  _Come on, scram,_ says Solly, and pokes her heel at you across the pavement.  _I got no time for dumb little girls._

It comes out of your mouth like vomit, choking on it behind your tears.  Something you’ve said a thousand times, _a-ain’t no girl._   And something you’ve never said before, _I’m one of you._ Burping up out of you ugly and full of heartburn as you point at her, something she hates the same way you hate it.

Solly looks at you and narrows her eyes, examining your bruised face, your cast, your grubby clothes.  She looks at the bouncer, who is waiting for her to decide on you, and then at the street as she takes a step towards you, checking to see if anyone is watching.  Then she shoos you towards the door with an open hand, chasing you in with a casual sashay like she’s doing nothing wrong at all.

She hounds you in by nearly stepping on your heels, all the way to the bar.  The Swan is gaudy, silver foil strips hanging behind the stage where a small live band plays and a woman sings and dances, little tables, stained red carpet, a wooden bar with mirrors behind it, everything dark or red or pink.  This song is _[Ain’t Nobody](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYfUS96f6w)_  by Chaka Khan, because that is what is being played by the band, what a girl is singing, in the Swan that night (you could call it a sign, but you’ll never be able to explain to groupies in years to come why you need to leave the room when that soul music comes on, save _I just hate this bluesy, funk shit, ya know_ ). 

 _Sit there,_ orders Solly, pointing at a bar stool almost in the corner of the place, shadowed and secret.  You’ll learn that this is her spot, later, when you come here frequently – when she lets you know.  But right now you just sit there stiffly, nursing your cast, like a little child as she waits for the bartender.

She’s quieter than the leopard print would imply, a subtle woman with a silent dignity.  She asks you how old you are again, and you tell her the truth, which makes her give a shuddering breath of anger, gather herself, and then turn back to the bartender.  She places a glass of cherry coca-cola on the bar beside you.  She has a whiskey herself, asking for something _hard, this girl is sixteen._   You repeat that you’re not a girl under your breath, but the coke has a cherry in it too, and you don’t care so much anymore.

 _Keep your eye on that, baby,_ says Solly, leaning on the bar as she watches you slide the glass back onto the bar.  She eyes you for a moment, sitting dumb there, and then puts her glass down and puts her hand over the top demonstratively.  _Baby?  Cover it, or someone will be taking you home for free tonight._

You quickly put your unbound hand over it, as she says, _if not on a stretcher,_ ashing her cigarette in a tray on the bar. _Looks like you’ve had plenty of that recently though..._ glancing at your cast.  She looks past you at the club, put upon, and then says carefully, _I don’t know why... you gotta bother me, of all people.  You always find me, you damn... foetuses.  Kids like you, you can see right through to the bleeding hearts, that’s what I think._

You shrug innocently, sipping at the straw in the cola.  Perhaps you can.

_But there’s nothing I can do for you... I mean, I’m just a chick out here too.  If anything you’re competition.  All I can say is, get the hell out of this city while you still can – Los Angeles is the devil’s flytrap.  Especially for a sixteen year old, little... tiny... girl-child –_

_Ain’t a girl,_ you say again, looking up at her under your fringe, and she stares flatly at you.

 _Seriously.  Ain’t that what you wanna hear, honey?_ _Ain’t that why you’re here?_ she asks, and you shake your head.  _No?  Look.  Maybe you’ll never be, like, a GG, but y’know.  I’m still alive._ She leans in to you, looking like your mom like that.  _Honey, you are beautiful.  You don’t have to tear yourself down like that.  You are a real girl._

You eyeball her crazily, holding the drink close to you.  _I_ ain’t, you say, _a_ girl ** _._**   Bugging your eyes.  Solly is having trouble with this.

_Baby, you come here, you say you’re one of me, you pull me in like this – if you just wanted some time alone with me, you’re way too young and way too poor, okay –_

_No,_ you say, exasperated, and point to yourself with your cast, _I’m_ one _of_ you _!  I am not a freakin’ girl!  You_ know?

And her silence and the look on her face tells you that she does.

 _I never met someone like you, you – y’know?_ you say, breathlessly, helplessly.  Solly says nothing, and narrows her eyes. 

Considering you on a deeper level now, she looks you up and down, smokes, takes her time with it, really picking you apart as you sit there anxiously under her gaze.  It is an assessment that is familiar to you, and you know you’re right because she ashes her cigarette pointedly and says, _what’s that accent, kid?_

You sniff at her.  No one’s really asked you that since you arrived.  Kids blow in from everywhere here.  So you tell her.

 _Wisconsin,_ she repeats, and then mimics you through her nose, _Wiscaaawnsin.  Your name Pickles?_

 _Err!  How’d you know that?_ you ask somewhat cluelessly, because although it is familiar to you, from Wisconsin law enforcement and rangers and bottle shop owners and neighbors, you have no idea what connection Solly could have to the people you know in L.A.  She shrugs, smokes placidly.

 _Guess you’re just one of those fortunate creatures, huh.  You get talked about… lucky you._ She looks straight at you, and you don’t feel so lucky.   _I heard a girl or a boy or just a dang idiot going by ‘Pickles’ was arrested on the Boulevard._

You bug your eyes and look into the cola, nudging the straw with your stiff fingers.  Solly smiles smugly at you.  _I see you can tell I’m dishing you the nice version of that story.  Johnny Five-O shut down the whole Boulevard after that girl overdosed, did you know that?   In the papers and all. But I heard, only one cacha was dumb enough to trot right up to them, and that cacha is the one with the most ugly name on the block, ‘Pickles’.  Miss Rose tells me all this, huh, can’t have been a week ago, but you sit pretty here before me so I guess you worked something out, hmm?_

You shrug your shoulders stiffly but Solly’s just smiling deeper.  _Actually I heard about that too.  You stabbed a security guard up at the place on Franklin.  Mm hmm!  And I am guessing that you saw an open door in a hospital and ran for it, cuz the last I heard you got the shit kicked out of you and were probably dead.  But you know chickens._ She tilts her head slightly, holding up her cigarette.  _They tweet._

You both sit there staring at each other for a while, the ice melting in your drink, and then Solly nods definitively, her curls bouncing around her face.  _Mm, you’re the one.  It’s the hair,_ she remarks, quietly proud of herself for noticing, _I can see it._

 _See what?_ you mumble, staring into your drink, and Solly holds up a hand in defeat with a little shrug.

 _You know, hon... you’re, um, de loh otro... but also, uno de_ ello _.  You know... very lucky...in both directions.  Very very lucky... very unlucky. Y’know._

You look despairingly up at her.

 _Y’know,_ Solly expands, _people notice you._

Your face falls even further.  You don’t think you want to be noticed, not by these people.

Solly watches this, she butts out her cigarette and leans forward on her bar stool, looking at you closely.  There is a lot of sympathy in her face, for all that’s worth, and you know what – that’s probably worth quite a lot.  Finally, she folds her wrists in her lap, her face framed by her curls and the fluff of her leopard jacket as she speaks to you, _Oz ain’t what you imagined, is it, honey?_

You shake your head, at first abruptly but then drooping to a sombre lean.  You wish you could have Solly’s whiskey instead of a fucking coke.  Shit looks _potent._   She leans on the bar, looking you over again, and says, _one of ‘us’, huh._

When you say nothing, just look up at her hopelessly under your brow, she repeats, _‘One’ of ‘us’.  They even have transsexuals in Wiscawnsan?_   She’s mocking you, but you’ve never heard that word before.  _I thought God kills all the deviants up there._

 _Uh, what’s a transsexual?_ you ask and hold the cola glass in your knees as you try to fish out the cherries from the ice.

 _Oh, baby,_ says Solly, leaning on the bar, her chin in her hand.  _Gee.  I’m sorry.  Sometimes, I let myself forget what it was like, before._

And that’s the word for it.  You know it is.  You’re such an idiot.  _It’s something that you are, in between when you are a little boy, and when you are a woman,_ says Solly, and then she winces, _or when you are a girl and when you are a, uh, man, I guess.  I dunno, I think Lou and his boys still use TS..._ talking to herself.

 _Fuck, well,_ you say, holding the cherries in your stiff fingers, _then I guess he did try pretty hard, huh.  But I’m still here._

 _I can see that.  Buttons down on the hesitation marks, baby._ Solly eyes you, looking pointedly at your wrist bared by your sleeve as you hold up the cherries to eat them off their stalks.  You’ve never heard them called that, either.  _Well, keep it that way,_ she says, and sighs as though she’s angry at herself even for asking, _you got somewhere to go tonight?  ‘Pickles’?_

She’s clearly not amused by your chosen name, but you don’t give a fuck what she thinks.  You tell her the address that Erin told you, and her eyebrows shoot up.  _Oh, honey, no way.  You can’t tell me all you told me and then expect me to send you up there to some sugar daddy.  Geez –_

 _Ain’t got no... uh... daddy..._ you say, hesitantly since the word feels so weird on your tongue, and Solly smiles viciously at you.

 _What other business could you have up there?  You ain’t going nowhere, baby.  You cosy up to a bleedin’ heart then you gotta deal with the blood._ She points at you with a red talon, and the next thing you know, you’re in the very first dressing room you’ve ever been in, hidden in the belly of the bar, watching women change and being fussed over, and the soundtrack to you downing their drinks whenever they step out back into the club is _[Runaway](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnHqXpreVTk)_  by the Salsoul Orchestra.  You don’t remember most of the other music, but that one sticks with you.  And that night you sleep on the floor of Solly’s apartment, _just until you find someplace else, jevo,_ and that’s just fine.  And you’ve found a friend.  Just like that.  Maybe you are lucky, after all.


	6. Bad Animals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter specific warning: dog mistreatment

So in the mornings it’s Solly’s apartment, hanging around her living room being called _jevo_ and _baby_ and _pai_ and _rebel rebel_ , and fed late brunches of pancakes or lunches of rice and beans as she lives out a fantasy as a mom or aunty in a family she hints she’s been cut out of, and in the afternoon it’s the Swan and copping cigarettes or feels off the girls while she rolls her eyes at you and they all try to talk you down, _oh, is he still here?  You little perv!_ but laughing the whole time, talking up Lou’s boys to you, or gossiping over your head. 

Then at about 10 pm Solly tells you it’s _adults only hours baby,_ and you have a choice: take her keys and go back to her apartment, play guitar or crawl along her bookcases listening to her records and reading her books and the newsletters she brings home for you, or go back on the streets, chasing down other street kids, knocking about with older rockers and eyeing up the seams of streetwalkers’ stockings, getting kicked out of clubs.  When you’re done, you can crawl back to her place and wait on the stairs for her to get back, and she’ll let you in – set you up on the couch with an old, oversized t-shirt to wear – and then lock herself in her room, and it’s that click of the latch which tells you you’re safe.  That she is more afraid of you than you are of her.  And that is safe.

And for a while that’s just ideal.  You have a chance to get your feet on the ground – both boots on the pavement, enough to fly away from any police you see, but you soon realise they’re not interested in you anyway.  You’re not on the run, you’re just another shitty kid, and you’ve found someone to leach off of for now.  Someone like you – in theory, anyway.

Actually, you have no idea what to make of Solly and the other women at the Swan.  Some of them are like Solly and some of them are real women – GGs, _genuine girls_ , she says – and you quickly realise you can’t tell which is which just by looking.  That doesn’t _stop_ you looking, because the Swan is also where you see your first set of, uh, _augmented_ tits in the flesh and bare as one of the women is changing in the dressing rooms, reflected in the mirror while Solly attempts to teach you how to apply mascara, and your jaw hits the floor so fast you basically need to scoop it off the carpet and nail it back on.  Solly clips you around the back of the head that time, _eyes to yourself, kid,_ but she can’t catch you _every_ time. 

It _sucks_ , now that you’ve finally got a room pretty much to yourself at night, that your right hand is fucking broken.  But even when you venture there with the left, you find your mind kinda cuts out – can’t focus on a fantasy, instead shorting to dream thoughts – the streets – aching – warm motel light – blood speckled on a window.  Then you’re thinking about something else.  Or you’re asleep from exhaustion.  Confusing, remembering what you were doing – being carried away from it again immediately.   No helping it.  Instead you settle for the next best, just stoke the turn on, making up excuses to help the ladies with the biggest breasts and thinking up shit to ask them like – oh!  Do they know where this address is?  They all laugh at you and ask why the hell do you want to go there, but when they laugh there’s, y’know, _good_ motion.  You make an ass of yourself for them, and damn, they _love you_.  The best is when they hug you, pull you right up against them.  You could stay here a while, and so long as they let you fetch them cigarettes, run little errands for them, then you’re gonna.

For the first time in over a month – or is it three – you have clean clothes, clean hair, a full stomach, and all you need to steal is liquor and fags.  Your bruises are fading to yellow, your wounds scabbing.  You begin to become aware of the days of the week again.  It’s a Tuesday when you go in to a nearby music store and play around with all their equipment.  It’s stupid to think your hand will heal well enough to play like you used to, but you are stupid, and besides Tony Iommi had all his fingertips chopped off and damned if he can’t play bass like a motherfucker.  You are determined to survive.

At the store your eyes lock on a Pignose busking amp and you buy it almost instantly, using the money from your last sojourn.  The symbolism of selling what was always made out to you as your only value for a busking amp does not escape you - that thing that you were meant to preserve for a husband and which without you were infernal, a whore, an imperfect woman, enforced constantly by beatings from your father and acidic words from your mother; for all it hurt, for all you blacked out, for all of its cheapness and grossness and the seizing dreams now, you are relieved that it’s gone.  Knowing it’s ruined, y’know, it’s _gone_.  $400 is of more use to you than it ever was, _girlhood._  It’s worth a busking amp, leads, new strings, new batteries for your walkman, a hot dog with mustard, a bottle of Mad Dog, and you still have money left over.

That afternoon, feeling lazy with the L.A. autumn sun, you sit proudly on the stair railing outside Solly’s apartment with your boots on the Pignose and wait for her to come home and let you in to your guitar, locked safely inside - or as safe as this area of the city ever is.  When you hear her heels on the cement below you perk and sit up brightly to greet her.  Even years later you’ll remember this moment, more than handing over the cash - Solly in her tight black dress, her white leather jacket, coming up the stairs with her keys in her hand jingling, her gaze lighting up with you from the bitch scowl she wears on the street, stopping at the foot of the concrete stairs to call up at you, _Oh, look at you!  Little rockstar!_ and her voice sounding like you feel inside, you know, full of music and joy, so you strike a little pose with a lifted shoulder and a pout, and your hair, glossy, lit up by the afternoon sun, and her laughter as she poses back, calling up, _Voguin’_ , _jevo!  You are voguin’!_ before she climbs past you and lets you in.

And even though you can only pluck at the strings with your right hand still in its cast, the sound that comes out of that little box is absolute divinity to you.  You’ve never had an electric guitar, you know.  That gritty, shitty little overdrive just sets your soul on fire.  If you hold still for too long, if you look around at how suddenly your luck has changed, these beautiful people around you, the sunshine – you could cry, you feel it pushing at you in every little moment of peace, and with your feet pulled up under you and curled up sitting on the toilet lid with its dumb orange shagpile cover in Solly’s house in the afternoon, you do cry, cuz everything is just coming all at once, y’know, you just weep.  Not sure if what you’re feeling is happy or scared or hurt or what, it’s just a heart attack of everything all at once.  Like every luck like a precious stone in your hand, and every shredded tatter of your life hanging bloody down like you can see them for the first time, all laid bare.  And it’s just so much... _more_ , than you’d ever thought it was.

On Thursday afternoon you are lying on the floor in the living room when Solly comes home in a flutter.  Amidst grabbing your stuff from around the room where you’ve dropped it and pointedly arranging it in a pile on the couch cushion nearest to you, she informs you that she has a visitor coming for the weekend - arriving tonight - _so make yourself scarce, jevo._  You have to find somewhere else to go, until Monday at least.  You pull out your earphones and say to her, well, if she just tells you where this damn address is, you’ll have somewhere to go, and the two of you lock horns there in her living room, Solly towering over you in her heels and a red jacket with her eyes narrowed down at you.  

No, she will not tell you where to whore yourself out.   _It’s a bad game, baby.  Are you listening to me?_  But you have already picked up from the way she speaks that she is not so unlike you, that her _guest_ is the one who pays her rent, that she is a kept woman, y’know, and you are not kind when you let her know you’ve realised (in those days, you had your mother’s tongue).   _Jevos_ aside (you asked her what that meant and she said it means _boyfriend_ , _like, a hunky beau, y’know,_ she can’t help it while she’s acting mom, it just comes out) you are pissed at being accused of this girlness, escorting, using that part of you for dumb profit - this accusation that you wanna do it, this accusation that you like to be raped.  So you call her a whore, and a fucking slut, and this just guarantees your swift ejection from her house. 

Stupid you, you forgot that even though Solly is a refined lady by practice, she is also physically a six foot black Puerto Rican, and she grabs you by your collar and just dumps you out into the stairwell.  Your bag follows but nothing else.  _Come back on Monday, fucking..._ _when we both get over this bullshit._   The door slammed.  You pull your bag towards you over the concrete landing, sitting on your sore ass, and a second later the door is open again and she’s towering over you with her hand on her hip, a furrow of concern over her face.  Like she’s betraying you.  Like she knows.  _I promise, I’ll still be here.  Look._   She leans over you, holding out a few folded ten dollar bills to you, and you snatch them with an ugly grimace, your heart aching.  _Take those.  Sort yourself out.  I promise, I_ promise _I’ll be here._   And then she tells you how to get to the address, out of the blue, gazing out of the complex in the direction she’s ordering you.  _If you gonna whore, rather you get taken care of, baby.  Don’t die, okay._

And the door slams.  And you’re back on the street again.

This song is _[Mean Street](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2R2KXNQR1M)_  by Van Halen, on your Walkman as you head into the hills.  There is absolutely no question in your mind that Solly will not be waiting for you.  By Monday, she will have forgotten her softness to you, just like she forgot when she chucked you into the stairwell.  You will return and collect your things, or if she will not let you have them, you’ll break into her house and take them back – you’ve already worked out how.  But after that you’re out again, and sleeping in bins.  Always was gonna be this way.  You aren’t truly wanted by anyone.

The way Wisconsin works is like this.  When someone tells you to _walk along X Street, and then turn onto Y_ , you’re not usually walking further than, say, a maximum of fifteen minutes - provided you’re not, like, trekking to another town or something insane.  You quickly discover - well - not quickly.  After about forty minutes of walking along Sunset Strip and running back to check that you haven’t actually passed the off-street, and then no, you haven’t, so you’ve got a hundred feet to catch up again, and you’re still on fucking Sunset, you discover that while you already knew Los Angeles didn’t work like that, it’s more intense than you could have imagined. 

Worse, when you’re on the streets of L.A. everyone feels the need to _comment_ on you, or it feels that way anyway.  If you so much as step in someone’s way trying to peer back at the street sign you’ve just passed, you get pushed out of the way and cussed out, _fucking punk ass lesbo, fucking faggot, get out of the way, you fucking tweaker._   It feels weird, when they cuss you out as a boy; like validating, but you’re also being pushed into a wall by someone who’d just as easily murder you as shove you out of the way.  I mean, is it really worth it?  But then it just takes someone honking their horn incessantly at you and yelling at you to show your tits, _smile, darling_ , for you to decide it’s much preferable.  Los Angeles is a city with an opinion, and damn if it’s not going to let you know it.

It takes four hours to get to Erin’s street.  _Four hours_.  By that time, the sun has gone down, and the usually stunning Los Angeles sunset is smothered by heavy clouds that have been gathering all afternoon now.  Fat rain drops started spotting the pavement a few hours ago, and the streets suddenly emptied, like you expect to hear a tornado siren or something to explain their sudden exodus but... nope.  Nothing.  Your feet are dragging, and you haven’t eaten all day apart from a hot tamale you bought from a street vendor downtown just after you left Solly’s in Florence (still bizarre to you – the accents, the food – Wisconsin is not known for its Mexican, and in fact before your road trip, you’d only spoken to two black people in your entire life, one of them at a punk gig in Milwaukee, the other a bespectacled guide at a school excursion).  By the time you’re standing in the mouth of her street, looking up another unfathomably long road winding uphill lined with crisp white terrace houses and high fences, the rain is coming down properly, sticking your hair to your head.  This area is greener, far from the chaos of the strips and downtown – quiet – looks like a movie.  Now what number did she tell you? 

Your memory for numbers isn’t stellar.  You know, calculus?  Easy.  Algebra?  Piece of cake.  Geometry?  Bam.  Pow.  Done.  Remembering a string of numbers without tapping a beat?  Impossible.  These numbers go up into the hundreds, 839, 841, 843, how the fuck are you meant to remember?  And that’s when you can find the numbers, pushing your wet hair out of your eyes to look for the bronze gleaming back at you through the dark off a high fence or behind a hedge.  You have been trudging uphill through the rain for an hour now and it’s getting late, and this song is _[Subdivisions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU)_  by Rush (music for dorks – secretly, you are a dork, and you’ve always known that, and besides you like those jerk-off drums – and besides, every punk is a dork, deep in their hearts). 

There’s no way you can keep going, no way you can remember the number.  With your hand held up to shield your eyes against the rain, you look around you, at the dark elms spidering over the sky and whipped by the rain, the imposing colonial facades, the empty winding street.  There’s nowhere to buy food around here.  Nowhere to buy liquor.  No shelter from the rain.  Every so often a single car will pass you, cruising slowly - nice, sleek, silver things like alien spacecraft, blinding you through the rain with their headlights.  But they’re coming less now.  You don’t have a watch, the clouds obscure the moon, the city never sleeps. 

You’re gonna have to do something for the night, find somewhere to rest, even if it’s just for a while.  There’s no way you can stay on your feet for much longer.  You are staggering along then, looking desperately for a bus stop or anything to shelter in, but there’s nothing.  No benches.  Just nothing.  A suburban purgatory that stretches around you.  You start to eye the walls of the properties, looking for one you can pop over, for coverage, somewhere to curl up, unseen, and nap.  Just for long enough.  You’ll be awake before long, you’re too hungry to stay out.  Can’t sleep on the street up here, that’s more dangerous than it is downtown - here no one is watching, no one passes by, and you’re obviously out of place among the miniature mansions here - if the cops were to pass by you wouldn’t last a second.  So this will be fine.  No one will know. 

You pop over the first wall short enough for you to pass and without a car in the driveway, plunging through a hedge into the garden beyond.  Your boots hit the wet soil of a garden bed with a thud, and ahead of you through the sheets of rain is a beautiful white colonial house, dumb rich-person columns and arches, well-groomed garden, a bricked front walk with huge black windows overlooking.  The house looks dead.  The rain pours off the awnings and puddles on the bricks, and you carefully tramp your way around the house to a side gate, climbing it again - hard with your cast - to drop into the back yard.

You drop down carefully, foot by foot onto wet bricks, bordered by garden beds, a path that runs up the side of the house.  You’ve never seen an alley like this in your life.  Beautiful, mossy.  It smells like the damp, rotting leaves from the deciduous trees all around, washed into the gutters and beds, wet earth, a growing smell beneath the clear of the storm.  

But just as your boot is touching the ground, you hear a snarl and freeze, petrified, hanging off the gate.  The snarl rises in pitch as it rounds the corner, and then you see it.  The dog.

It’s a bichon frise.

You look down at this angry wet cotton ball as it careens to the gate at your feet and starts yapping at you.  It’s taking you every effort not to either laugh at it, or try to land on its head, but you wave your foot at it whispering, _shh, shh!  C’mon, lay off, Fido,_ and then drop to the bricks with little more than a splash.  The dog, if you could call it that, continues to bark and growl at you, barely heeding you poking your boot at it and hissing at it to _shut up, ya lil’ puffy douchebag!_ except to spring back a step and continue its verbal assault.

Well.  You’re pretty sure its owners aren’t here.  Its barking is making your skin crawl with panic, but it ain’t, like, dangerous.  You walk straight past it into the backyard, the feral little thing worrying at your heels.

This is nice.  There’s a kinda entertainment area, brickwork again, with a vase fountain that’s overflowing with the rain and flooding the brickwork.  The awnings of the second storey of the house overhang this level, shading it, and amongst the lush colonial garden and hedges also hang baskets of plants around the edge of the entertainment area.  Again, much of it is flooded, but over near the back glass doors the paving is raised slightly and sits dry, but the bichon’s kennel is there, very cute.  If you were feeling game you could probably sit in there.  The kinda house this is it probably has its own attic, kitchen and ensuite.  But eh… you might not be much above a dog, you might not be much above a bitch.  But you are above this gay-ass little fucker biting at your heels.

 _Jesus!  Get bent!_ you snap and aim a half-hearted kick at the dog.  You don’t actually want to hit it and of course the kick is too slow to make contact.  The bichon springs out of the way into the puddles, barking madly at you.  A light turns on over the southernmost fence.  You’re hissing back at the dog, _shh! Shhh!  Puppy, lil’ – fuckin – puppy-dog, listen, I - god!  Please, shut up!_  

You squat in the puddle and reach out for the dog, trying to grab its dumbass red collar, and then as you hear a voice over the fence and the dog keeps barking, you manage to snag it and pull it through the water.  The dog does not like this, snarling violently at you with its eyes rolling so you can see the whites, and as it hauls back on you and the wet collar slips from your fingers, it fucking bites you right on the hand.

You cannot hold back your yelp as a mawful of tiny pin-like teeth punch into your first two fingers, and as the collar slips out of your hand, you fall ass-first into the dirty puddle.  And god, if you could, you would fucking _scream_ , because now your jeans are soaked right through to your lily-white butt now, and the dog’s teeth have pierced right into your skin. 

Instead you squeal under your breath and try to shake the dog off of you as you flail around in the puddle.  But the bichon has tasted blood, and it fucking holds on snarling madly as you jerk your arm around in desperation, towing it through the puddle.  You’re swearing under your breath and trying to swat at the fucking thing with your cast when you hear footsteps through the water and the side gate open.

 _Stupid mutt,_ grumbles an older woman’s voice as you sit there on your ass and stare in horror out towards the side of the house, a flashlight’s beam fluttering into the garden ahead, and then she yells out:  _Elaine!  What’s the matter!  Do you miss your mommy!_

Oh my god.  This dog’s name is _Elaine_.

You lock gazes with the beady black eyes of the demon bichon, curling your lip, and you whisper, _ooh, sorry, Elaine_ , _but you can go straight back to hell,_ and you struggle onto your feet, this fucking dog hanging off your arm, and then you throw your arm with the highest velocity you can manage and toss the dog off with the sheer movement alone.  You barely hear the dog’s squeak of impact as it splashes into the puddle behind you as you bolt for the north fence, your boots kicking through the water, and you are already up on your elbow and scrabbling over as the woman screams.

_Elaine!  Thief!  Dog thief!  I’m calling the police, you hoodlum!_

You sling your leg up over the high fence and then fall straight down into the wet garden beyond, landing on your side with a thud.  The dirt smells moist around you, but you’re sheltered from above by the garden on this side – huge umbrella plants, ferns, tropical flora rather than the colonial plants of the other side.

The bichon is yapping again and you decide it’s time to make yourself scarce.  You roll over in the garden bed and crawl under the ferns towards the rain, staggering to your feet once you make it clear onto brickwork again.

There’s a fucking swimming pool here.  Holy shit.  You stare at it for a second, at a beautiful backyard overgrown with broad-leafed tropicals and walled by this garden, a blue swimming pool at its centre, the surface broken by the rain falling onto it as it laps at its brim.  You glance up at the house, a flatter thing – still white, still multi-storey – and its black windows, and then back at the fence lost in the garden behind you, the dog barking behind it.  This house looks quiet too, deserted.  You need somewhere to hide.  And so you run around the pool, splashing through the puddles, and grab the handle on the glass sliding door and swing all your weight against it, and whaddaya know, it just fucking slides open.

You fall onto the wet bricks again, and then struggle back up to look into the fucking mansion you’ve just, uh... broken into.  There’s a kinda lounge room in here, tiled with huge rugs, smelling pleasantly of home and warmth, potpourri, snuffed incense – anything just to be out of the mud right now, dripped puddles marking your path slinking across the white tiles.  Fuckin’... chandeliers, a kinda Art Deco thing, hanging over your head in boxy shadows.  Huge, beautiful paintings, probably genuine for all you can tell, of leopards and pheasants and shit.  There’s even a fucking grand piano here, parked up near the wall of windows facing onto the garden, huge white couches with exotic throws, a bar – _a bar!_

You’re over there like a fucking zip, dogs and mud forgotten, pulling the top of an expensive bottle of peach schnapps with your fringe dripping over your face as you throw it back.  God, after a day without drinking and trekking uphill, it’s like the nectar of the gods sliding smoothly and thick down your throat.  And you’re leaning on the bar, trying to read the label in the darkness, when you hear a door open and close somewhere above you and then a bright flashlight casts across your face, blinding you.

 _Who’s there?_ calls a girl’s voice, and you have raised the bottle as an assault weapon when, _Pickles?_  she yelps, and lowers the torch beam.  It takes a second for your eyes to clear, but sure enough, she’s already turned those big orange deco chandeliers on and darted down the stairs to the lounge, pulling the door closed on the storm outside, and it’s fucking _her,_ the girl in the hospital, standing before you in this beautiful house in a satin nightdress, staring at you in wonder – _Erin._  

You quickly put the bottle back onto the shelf, a sudden and huge guilt eclipsing you.  Oh, fuck, that’s rude, stealing a chick’s alcohol.  But she just giggles at your horrified face, the awkward smile that crawls up after it, and holds the torch behind her back, smiling at you, bouncing on her heels, waiting for you to say something.

You wait for her, too, trapped in the corner of the bar.

When a tense moment, silent except for the rain outside and your clothes dripping on the tiled floor, hangs between you for too long Erin looks at her bare feet with a shy smile, hums softly to herself, and then looks back up at you, rocking from foot to foot: _you can have it, if you like.  Um…_

You panic.  What.  What is she talking about.  If it’s - y’know - you don’t know how to - if she thinks you’re a --

_The, um, schnapps.  Um, help yourself.  My parents are in Paris, they won’t, um, notice... the difference._

OH.

You can’t take your eyes off her as you reach blindly, desperately, for the schnapps again.  In case she changes her mind.  Your hand, numb with cold and bleeding from the bichon’s fangs, boxes clumsily at the bottles on the shelf behind the bar, and you only look away from her when you realise you’re about to drop three separate bottles of spirits and turn only just in time to catch them in your arms, the crook of your elbow above your cast, before they smash on the tiled floor.  Your heart is beating so hard you think you’ll go blind, squeaking as you manoeuvre them back up onto the shelf, and once you’ve got the schnapps bottle in your fist and you’re just standing there again, you’re shivering like mad with your nerves.  You do _not_ feel at home here.  You don’t feel like you belong in this fuckin’... rich ass place at all.  What if you break something?  God, she’ll be so angry…

But she’s just giggling at you, trying to cover her laughter with her hand - she keeps trying to pull up her head straight and look at you squarely, coldly, and then loses it again.   _You - you’re sure?_ you ask anxiously, holding up the bottle, and when she nods you can’t wait any longer.  You are so knotted up by her just watching you that you down it in one, well-practiced in the art of chugging an entire bottle before any authority catches you with it by now, and the schnapps burns down your throat and pools warm in your belly as you gulp it back in a matter of seconds.  Lick the mouth of the bottle, and then your lips.  And look at her again.

Erin is staring at you with a kind of crushed horror, even awe, that you had not counted on.  There’s silence between you, and you clumsily replace the bottle on the shelf, ashamed, at a loss of where else to put it.  You realise that maybe she wanted to share, too late.  The bottle is completely empty.

 _Um,_ says Erin, and fiddles with the torch, and she looks you up and down with wide eyes and then she says, _golly - you’re all wet.  You must be so cold.  I’ll --_

And before you can tell her that this is nothing, that this rain is basically tropical compared to Wisconsin, she’s dashed away back up these stairs at the back of the room and vanished.  You’re left standing in the quiet, looking around in the warm yellow light of those chandeliers smacking your lips for the strong taste of the schnapps.  You reach for another bottle without thinking, this one labelled as ouzo.  You dunno what that is.  You don’t even know how to say that.  _Ouwhzoah…_

You have unscrewed the top when Erin’s face appears around the corner of the top of the stairs again.  _Come on!_ she calls, beckoning, and you drip uselessly at the bar.

 _But I’ll get water on the_ –

_Come on!_

She’s vanished again.  You have no choice but to follow, conscious of the muddy water your boots track over the tiles and rugs, but by the time you reach the cream carpet of the shallow stairs they are mostly dry, thank god, save for what drips off your body.  The stairs curve into the house, a dark corridor, with the warm lights in sconce fittings dimmed down, mirrors that bounce back your drowned rat reflection as you pass them.  There are a lot of doors, but only one is open, the light on inside, and you trudge there first – only to be ambushed by Erin throwing a huge, fluffy towel over your head, laughing at you as you reel backwards on tiles.

You pull it off your head with the same hand that holds the ouzo, and god, she’s just so – hold on.  If you were about to get giddy over this girl, you totally lose your tongue as you take in this fucking bathroom.  For one it’s as big as your room at home – err, in Wisconsin, that is.  Home is nowhere now – err – _jesus_.  Everything is this peachy marble, a huge gleaming mirror, chrome and porcelain.  Erin takes the ends of the towel so that it’s looped around your neck, pulling it taut, but instead of tugging you close she drops them again – nervously smiles – and you’re just saucer-eyed, terrified.

 _This is your hooaause?_ comes idiot out of your mouth, because of fucking course it is, and you have never heard your coarse Yooper drawl as acutely as in that moment with this beautiful girl giggling at it.

_Well, it’s my parents’ house..._

_Yeah, but you live here...!_   You still can’t believe it.  This place is like a fucking movie, like a fairytale.  Shit like this doesn’t exist in real life.  Your eyes darting from the crystal perfume bottles to the bronze ornaments, to the beautiful girl and her blonde hair spilling over her face, her soft pink cheeks, to the fucking marble, the faux roses, the bath that could fit you in it four times over. 

 _I do,_ she says, _you found me..._ and that makes you blush like crazy, nails your feet to the marble.  You haven’t blushed in fucking years.  Why should you for her?  What’s so special about blondie here?

 _Ooh, err, well, I got lucky, I think I’m just... y’know..._ you tell her, helpless, wringing the bottle neck in your sweaty palms, and she draws close to you, her eyes downcast but a smile tugging at her lips.

 _I think you are magic,_ she says softly, taking your cast hand, and her fingertips are warm and so, so soft – but before you can kiss her she’s pulled away, moving for the door.  _I’ll get you some clothes.  You better get out of those before you catch a chill..._

A chill, in L.A.?  Really?  But, _you can have a bath if you like,_ she’s saying, and then she’s shut the door on you, and you’re left to sigh, all the tiny breaths you were holding rushing out of you in one.

So you lock the door and you have that bath, running it hot and deep as you slowly peel off your wet, muddy clothes and sip at the ouzo.  You are standing naked in there when you hear her voice on the other side of the door, telling you she’s left the clothes outside the door, and a few minutes later your hear music, a Heart record, another old favourite of yours, from somewhere in the house – she must be playing it loud – god, and it’s painful, it breaks your heart and you don’t know why.  You useta be able to play all these solos on Seth’s old guitar, sheltered in your room, your bedroom door removed by your parents for teenage indiscretions... and somewhere in Los Angeles, this girl was sitting in this insane oyster of a house, gilt and pearl, and listening to those same songs sat cross-legged on a Persian rug or – or something... or something.

Once you’re clean and warm and towelled off – the bath came up to your neck in the end, and has left you flushed bright red from your hair to the soles of your feet – or you’ll say it’s the bath, anyway – you snare the dry clothes from outside the door and bring them in to change.  It is woefully apparent that the huge paisley robe she’s left you is her father’s, the hem of it almost reaching your ankles and the sleeves drooping over your hands.  By this point you’ve finished a quarter of the ouzo, and you don’t give a fuck how ridiculous you look with your hair scraped back behind your ears and this ridiculous robe, and stagger out into the corridor anyway, following the sound of the record through the corridor until you find her, in her bedroom, sitting over a record player on her rug – just perfect like that - oh.

And so this _[Everywhere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmyDosjjP5U)_  by Fleetwood Mac, because that is the song she has on when you’re both just standing there, your fingers intertwined on your one good hand, your noses touching before your lips meet, just once, and she whispers to you, smiling around the words, _you taste like peaches... liquorice... sorry, um... it's - nice..._  and then again, and again, and again, like it will never end.


	7. Daydream Nation

When you wake up, the girl is gone.  It takes you a while even to lift your liquor-heavy head from the bed, your eyeballs rolling in confusion as you take in the unfamiliar room, the robe you’re wearing, the hundreds of paper faces that look down at you in a swimming blur in the morning light.

Erin’s bed is large, larger than you’ve ever seen, even in hotels, with ornate white metal frame and a sheer lace canopy suspended over the top.   You slept on top of her covers with her beneath, curled beside her body and watching her face as you fell asleep, her finger tracing your cheek – you remember lights, bleeding out of their bulbs like smudges, and when you find the bottle of ouzo on the floor by the bedside it’s half empty.  You don’t recall much of last night except this smear – kissing her soft lips, holding her hand – whispered voices as you both sat on her bed – nothing else, and your head beats.

You lie on your back, sprawled across the bed, and tip your head backwards off the edge to look around the room.  Huge, beautiful windows with lace curtains, the pale morning light lending everything an eerie, ghostlike glow.  A vanity, white, covered in compacts and pallets, brushes, bottles, with a big, ornate mirror.  A matching stool.  Closet, painted white, scarves hanging off the door knobs.  Moroccan rugs on the floor.  The record player, a box of records hidden between the vanity and the bedside table, the sleeves scattered over her floor where you had been listening to them together.  On her wall, above her bed, a weird mix of cut out photos of rockstars you barely recognise – there weren’t many magazines to come by in Tomahawk, not through punks, and you were never allowed to watch them on TV – and illustrations of picture book fairies, their flowing lines and pastels, stuck around them from a childhood rapidly being left behind.  But too sentimental to take them down quite yet.

When you have drunk enough ouzo to get to your feet again, to press down the beating in your skull, you start to wonder where your new sweetheart has gone – what could be worth leaving you for – and then you see she has left you a note, written in a school lined notebook open on the vanity.  Her handwriting is beautiful, smooth and clear cursive, like yours was always shaky and impossible to read – ah!  Your memories from last night of soft blonde hair and her pink cheeks send your hand to your heart, pressing against it in pain.  No one should have any right to be this lovely, in sum, you know... there has to be some catch.

She’s gone to school.  It’s a school day? – oh!  Yeah, it’s Friday today.  You sink to sit on the vanity’s stool, dragged by sadness that she would leave you for something so trivial as fucking _school_.  But she’ll be back later.  She’s said so.  There are little drawings next to her beautiful words.  Clothes – in the wash.  Fine, you were wondering where they were.  You’ll have them back later today.  Seems mysterious to you, that they’d just vanish and come back clean, but fine.  You’ll just wear the robe for now.

Help yourself to whatever, she writes.  Watch out for the maid (the maid! you think, like _god_!).  She knows a friend of Erin’s is staying but Erin has lied to her and told her you’re a girl.  Please don’t tell her _anything_ or Erin’s parents will kill her!  Just keep your head down.  You suppose you can do that.  But first you’re going to have a poke around, toting the ouzo with you as you explore the enormous house, poking your head into every dark room and looking for things you could potentially lift and pawn for money later.  But you don’t find her mother’s jewellery, or her father’s watches, and the whole place just knocks you down with how involved it is, how vast.  You wonder what her father does for work, what her mother does, to travel the world, to live in a place like this, to have a _maid_.  You think rockstars live in places like this, probably – you’ve heard of them living in the Hollywood Hills.  And movie stars.  But do other people live here too?  You can’t even imagine what they might do, if so.  Something miraculous, not just doctors and lawyers, y’know.  It would have to be.

In the kitchen, you gawk at the coffee machine for a while before you decide you have no idea how to use it and just have a straight glass of milk from the refrigerator.  Milk and ouzo goes quite well together, actually, and then you are standing in the living room again, gazing out at the lush garden and the raindrops still hitting the swimming pool in wonder.  You inspect the piano, lifting the lid to its keys and playing a few with your good hand – you don’t know how to play the piano, but there’s a book set up on its stand in front of you.  _The Carpenters Anthology._

Then this song is _[Superstar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJmmaIGiGBg)_  by the Carpenters, the song that the book is open to.  You cannot read sheet music but this book has chords written above the staves, much like the tabs you’ve inspected in Seth’s guitar books, and there’s a loose sheet with the breakdown of each chord slipped into the front of the book.  You pick out a few with your left hand.  Fm/Eb.  Db.  Ab/C.  You’ve never heard this song before.  It appears to be about someone in love with a rockstar who has toured away – so of course, you suppose, it’s Erin who has been learning this.  You press your finger down sadly on a key, reading the slow, yearning lyrics, and wish it was about you instead. 

But then you hear the front door open, a woman call _hello?_ , and you’re back upstairs like a bolt, closing yourself in Erin’s bedroom again.  You just sit in there for over an hour you think, hearing her pass in the corridor and open doors – clean rooms – and you’re just staring out the window, at the lace curtains moving, paralysed at being found out, like, in her _room._   That has never ended well before.  You think you could hide in her closet maybe – do maids clean closets?  Really you have no idea what a maid would do, even.  But instead, listening closely to her progress beyond the door, you wait until she has moved past the room you’re in, doing all the rooms on the right side of the corridor before returning, you figure, and until you hear a distant door, and then you make a break for the bathroom and lock yourself inside.

You stand there for a while, hand on the lock, listening to see if she chases you.  But nothing.  You’re safe.  You were starting to feel exposed in a room without one anyway.  Besides, she said help yourself to whatever, right?  And that definitely means another chin-deep hot bath while the rain falls against the frosted window outside.

The maid passes again and you hear her try the lock while you’re standing there in the steam, the bath filling hot, looking at your body in the large clear mirrors and unpicking its grotesque uncanny, and you freeze full-body, but she’s gone in a second, just throwing, _all right, honey,_ before she moves on.  You only feel worse for it, like you wish your flesh would just melt off of your soul right there in the grey, overcast light.  If you have one of those.  Stepping into the hot bath, just a touch of scalding, is as close as you’re going to get in this lifetime.  And it makes you forget, at least, that and the ouzo, which you’ve soon finished, enjoying too much the difference between the cold, biting liquor and the hot water that surrounds you and turns your skin ruddy pink.

So you don’t know how long you stay in the bath.  At some point it starts getting blurry and pleasant again, just breathing the steam and listening to the rain, and you forget the body you inhabit and the words that surround it, and the good feelings, the calm, those physical manifestations of carelessness and peace can come in on you, pass over you with the coolest touch, the temperature of your body so much the same as the bathwater that you may as well not exist – may as well not be able to differentiate one from the other, or dissolve, or be nothing except your shoulders, cast and head on the side of the tub.  And a delicate feeling inside your chest, high up, on top of your lungs, like the waxy petals of a pond lily opening – a feeling just like that, though you don’t know what it means.  It just is, at that moment.

When you finally leave the bath, the maid is gone.  Your clothes are there, on the end of the bed, laundered and folded – the fabric soft and smelling strange, not just clean but like – not even smelling of cheap soap powder, like you are used to.  But you don’t get changed.  You just curl up there on her bed again, holding one of her pillows in your arms and breathing in the smell of her from the pillow, and from all around you, and go to sleep again.

You are woken by Erin flopping down on the bed beside you, your eyes snapping open to her face inches from you and just gazing at you with a dreamy smile.  She is wearing her school uniform, an aggressively modest dark grey thing with a dark, harsh-shouldered blazer, white blouse, the grey pleated skirt down over her knees, high grey socks crumpled around her ankles and her prim school shoes, even a grey bow in her hair.  But she looks angelic - her halo of blonde hair almost a platinum under the grey afternoon light, her blue eyes brought out by her dark clothes like a sunny day - clear and distant.  You think she is wearing makeup, just lightly.  Her cheeks still pink through it.

 _Hello,_ she murmurs eventually, smiling at your rousing, and you sigh sleepily in return.

_Oh, hello…_

She gazes at you with a restrained delight playing over her face for a moment longer, her finger in her mouth as she chews at her nail, and then she darts forward to kiss your cheek with an affected _mwah_ and a squeak - not complaining - from you.  She sits up from you on her knees, her skirt spread out across her legs, and pokes you in the side with her pointed fingers to more squeaks - this time of complaint, you are ticklish, and try to catch her hands as you whinge at her to stop.

_Come on.  Get up.  Get up!  I can’t believe you’re in the exact same place I left you.  La-zy bones…_

You roll over onto your front to protect your tits from her vicious onslaught, holding your hands over your head defensively.  Erin is… weird, you still can’t tell if she knows you’re a different kind of boy or not.  Unlike everyone else you’ve been with, who knew from the start - in the context of school or small town rumours.  The way this girl treats you makes you want to keep it secret from her for as long as possible, though you’re not sure how that will work - if she’ll hate you once you say no.

But that would be a matter of time, anyway.  They all leave, whether you love them or you hate them or you don’t mind either way - they all leave.

When you push her off and sit up, the room dives sickly around you and that’s how you know you’re still drunk.  You instead slope straight into her arms, not even attempting to catch yourself until you’re falling over her, and you kiss her lips against her laughing, trying to catch you – struggling to hold your lips closed to kiss her around your own giggles, and you are so dumb and smitten in that moment, you don’t even care about all the broken glass inside you.  Then you’re falling into her kiss altogether, suddenly silenced by the frightening welling of feeling, unable to pull away.  Until she does, pushing you gently back from her, looking between your eyes and mouth with flickering uncertainty, and then smiling gently before she tells you, _um, there’s food, downstairs..._

And that’s the best news all day.  Five minutes later you’re sat on a high stool at the kitchen bench and wolfing down a hot beef casserole from a weird tinfoil catering container while she is satisfied by the accompanying pasta salad.  Her parents set it up with a diner on her way home from school, apparently, friends of the family – she always has hot meals.  It has been a few weeks now since you’ve had anything heavier than rice and beans, and this is more like what your family would eat, but better than anything your mother ever achieved.  _You sure eat fast,_ observes Erin, amused but vaguely concerned, and you stop with the fork halfway to your mouth like – do you?  Huh.

 _Guess I’m just, uh... useta gettin’ it down so’s I can go like... upstairs.  Y’know.  Family._   You snort and roll your eyes, but Erin looks at you cluelessly.

 _You don’t like your family?_ she asks you, playing with the tubes of macaroni with the end of her fork, and you think that’s the stupidest question she could have asked.

 _Duh._   Shovelling a hunk of beef into your mouth.

_Why not?_

This time you look at her like she’s the dumbest person on earth, deadpan, as if she should be able to see your entire history written on your face.  If she’d given you a robe with shorter sleeves, a shorter skirt, she would have seen it written on your arms and thighs in pink and white lines.  But she didn’t.  She doesn’t have a clue.

You guess you’ll have to tell her.  Welp. 

 _They’re just..._ you stab another piece of beef with the fork pointedly, _a bunch of real screwed up assholes, y’know.  Just real..._ – and then you shove it in your mouth without thinking, talking around it – _douchebags._

Erin clearly does not understand, and looks even slightly shocked by your language.  _Okay,_ she says sadly, poking at her salad, _I’m sorry... that they’re so, um... cruddy.  I think you’re great._

 _Sure,_ you say, and you’re perfectly happy, as blasé as your comment might sound.  You’re away from it now.  You don’t even think of those douchebags.

Naively, you ask her that night if she is going out, being Friday and all.  But Erin never goes out.  She has no friends who go out, she has never _been_ out.  You wonder, if she loves music so much, _why_ she doesn’t go out.  Well... she’s not really allowed, y’know, being a girl alone and stuff...

But that never stopped you.  So why should it stop her.

You decide then and there, you declare, you are going to find a rock n roll gig and you’re gonna go.  Together.  Next Saturday, okay?  She’s giggling at you, flattered, her knees showing from under her long school skirt.  And that’s how you get her to promise another week – to be tied to you until then.

Usually, Erin just studies or listens to records or reads books – tonight, you listen to her Heart records and you explain to her, with your left hand dancing over imagined strings and your right paralysed in its cast, how to play the introduction to _Crazy On You_ while she listens, smiling softly at you, fascinated.  But this isn’t that song.  Not yet.  Right now, she asks about your cast – how long you’ve had it on.  You had it in the hospital, but she doesn’t know if it was before that; and this takes some real thinking about.  You’re not sure how long it’s been, actually, since the hospital.  And she reveals to you: almost three weeks.

Almost three weeks she was waiting for you.

That is all you think. 

Erin tells you that she broke her hand once, playing soccer, and the cast only needed to be on two weeks.  So she takes you upstairs, sits with you on the bathroom floor as you slug at the last of the ouzo, and she carefully cuts it from your hand, the long arms of the hairdressers’ scissors pressing cool against your wrist beneath.  The skin beneath is sensitive and raw, her warm hands stroked across it, and she bandages your wounded fingers to one another and then to your third finger with such care like you might shatter in her hands.  And then she kisses your knuckles, looks up at you over the hand she holds, and smiles at you.  And at that point you think, oh god.  You might actually love this chick.  You know, like... love.

You’ve said that word before to girls.  You’ve said it over and over again, and you’ve meant it, curled under covers with fucked up chicks in your arms or kissing their lips and necks, your hands all over one another, Josie, Jacqui, Adelaide.  There’s something about Erin that is different to those fucked up girls, though – maybe because she is older, just as you are older now, and this is an older thing you have – like how adults fall in love, maybe, like in Whitesnake songs, burning cold and burning heat all at once.  You think that must be it, a painful yearning that is kept at a distance by her, a _woman_ , or the closest you’ve gotten anyway, not just a girl (and only reinforcing to you how you are not a woman, so different to her you are, you feel).

And you kiss and listen to records, and fall asleep in her arms again, drunk.

On Saturday she takes you out for milkshakes.  Your jeans fit incredibly after their proper wash, you can barely believe it, and being free of the cast is a dream.  Walking hand and hand through the wealthy Westside with a beautiful chick, like a blazingly beautiful, incredible chick in a long pleated skirt belted high on her waist and a collared blouse, and you in your big leather jacket, a _bad boy_ , it’s just such a fucking good feeling, it’s – it’s an old, tragic song, _[Perfect Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wxI4KK9ZYo)_  by Lou Reed, and god, you can’t believe your own sappiness – your own brief window of sunshine.  You can even pay for her milkshake with the money Solly gave you, a little kick of regret, that she is somewhere out here too, in a different world, a different class, a different... existence, basically...

Sit in the park sipping from a bottle of her parents’ wine from inside a paper bag.  Talking about... shit, nothing.  Bands and shit.  Resting your head against hers and just watching people go past in the afternoon light.  And then home, another hot meal, sharing wine with her this time as you lay around on the couches and listen to her play the piano for you.  _Superstar_ , yeah, and other such hits – Gilbert O’Sullivan, Carole King, Paul McCartney.  She has a lovely, airy voice, though restrained.  You tell her you want to be able to play piano, your legs up on the couch arm, and you wish you were real adults – that you were a superstar – that you had a house like this and you could just live like this, forever.

When you go to her room again, you kiss on the bed, pushing further than you’ve dared before – with her, at least, your nerves getting to you.  But you decide to just press through them, kissing her open mouthed and catching her hands when she reaches for your chest, moving them to loop around your hips which she accepts, understands that you don’t like it there.  Then you’re kissing her neck, your free hand running her skirt up her warm thigh, your stiff and bound fingers seeking out her breast through her blouse – and suddenly her hand is on yours, moving it off of her, her kiss pulled away. You want to ask her why, but she’s already beaten you, her eyes down-turned.  _Um, I don’t wanna, um, go so fast_ , she tells you, and though it feels like a needle pushed cold through your heart, you nod and lay down beside her instead, looking up at her with dumb sad eyes, wondering what’s so wrong with you.  But it’s okay.  It’s okay.  And she falls asleep in your arms, and everything is all right, for now.


	8. Lucky Strike

On Monday, once your sweetheart has suffered your departing kisses and promises and left for school, you endeavour to cross the city once more.  This morning is different, however, for the avenue winds out before you in the sunshine like you could knock out a musical number right now, skip and trot into the inevitable blue sky and up to the moon, the palm trees leaning out from you in awe; the heel peeling off the bottom of your boot doesn’t even stop you from breaking into a run.  You have to get your guitar.  You have to busk.  Get money.  Get in a _band_ , man. 

For _her._

Shit!  That’s the grossest, mushiest thing you’ve ever fucking thought, but there it is!  You want to take her to shows, buy her presents – cocktails, dresses, diamonds!  You want nothing more than to be the rockstar she’s dreaming of, and then she can just do nothing or whatever she wants, man, it doesn’t matter, so long as she’s doing just what she wants to.  So long as she’s _happy_.  Haha.  Gross...

On the last stretch through Florence, the midday sun down on you like a halo, you walk with such pride and determination that a group of young black men smoking outside a newsagents laugh at your strut and you just point your finger at them and smile like, yeah.  _That_ cool. 

But the approach to Solly’s unit freezes your attitude.  By the time you’re on her doorstep you’re calculating how to break in, but the front door handle gives easily under your hand.  She’s left it unlocked.  This is weird, Solly would usually be out on errands by this time – so you step in cautiously, eyes wide as you enter, ears pricked for any evidence she’s still home.

There is a smell.  You can’t place it exactly, sort of a mingling of sweat, perfume, booze, vomit, cigarettes and the streets that you associate more with the back of clubs or the squat than Solly’s tidy little pad.  You almost trip on an empty wine bottle that’s lying in the doorway to the living room, and then the woman that’s passed out clutching it.  She’s not Solly, or anyone you know, and her makeup has run and she’s totally only wearing her bra.  The sound of snoring fills the living room.  And uh, excuse me, what the fuck?  Has Solly had a fucking _party?_

There are people all over the lounge room.  Women and gay men by the looks of it, trashed and passed out around the place, just on the floor snuggled up together or stretched over the furniture.  One of them is Solly; she’s passed out draped over the loveseat looking completely zonked, her stockings laddered, her dress askew, her makeup smeared, and snoring with her mouth open.  Two of them are awake, a couple it looks like, one sitting beneath the window and her partner smoking out the open window, and they both turn around to stare at you as you enter, but say nothing.  There are bottles and full ashtrays all over the place, cocaine residue on a plate on the coffee table, and discarded clothing – miniskirts, bras, even panties – looks like Solly parties pretty fucking hard in your absence, huh.

But the only thing you’re concerned with is your guitar, which – thank fuck – has been defended and is still lying in its case beneath the coffee table.  You pull it out, and snag your amp from by the bookcase, and then make to leave – but Solly’s leg suddenly shoots out in front of you, to block your way between the loveseat and the coffee table.  You glare at it and huff, turning to escape, but she’s already getting up and snagging you by the open side of your biker jacket in a clawed hand.

 _Uh-uh, jevo_ _, where do you think you’re goin’?_ she asks, pulling gently on it, and you stop to glare down at her.  Her big brown eyes are up at you, begging you. _Baby, no.  Sneaking around... you are welcome home.  C’mon._

She tugs it again, and you would spit back at her but that word crushes you.  Not _jevo_ , _home_.  You narrow your eyes and clutch your guitar, sceptical of anyone wielding that fake-ass word around you, but Solly just releases you and shakes out her tangled weave, combing it with her nails as she tuts to herself.  _Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch_... _sorry about the mess, baby.  Gentleman left yesterday afternoon so maybe we had a lil’ night out at Circus... then maybe just a lil’ kiki back here, and the girls get wild y’know... shit, I broke a nail._

She may as well be talking a different language, and you stare at her waiting for an explanation.  Instead, once she has inspected the troublesome digit in detail, she looks up at you again and claps her hands together excitedly.  _But baby!  I have a special surprise for you!  To say, welcome home,_ _jevo_...

 _What?_ you chirp up at her, and she stands up, tottering at first towards the bedroom and then cursing and pulling off the single tall pump that remained on her foot and chucking it aside.  She gestures for you to follow, and you warily put down your guitar and amp.

 _C’mon, I put them in here..._ And _them?_ you are thinking, what could possibly be _them_? _You see Nadia had a wardrobe clearout on Saturday and I saw them and I was just like ah!  He needs those!  And I think they are the perfect size baby, just you see!_

So clothes.  When you peer in the bedroom, Solly is rooting around underneath her bed on her knees and two revellers are in her bed, immediately drawing the covers up over their naked chests in shock as you wander in.  Yeah, not suitable for kids, whatever.  You’re more interested in whatever hideous thing Solly has acquired for you.  Because it can’t possibly be good, can it?  The woman wears fucking leopard print and blue eyeshadow casually.

She emerges holding a shoebox, a long one, and okay, _those_ , makes sense.  Standing before you and holding it out across her forearm proudly, Solly lifts the lid for you, unveiling _them_ with much ceremony, and if all this time you’ve been choking back your anticipation but then you see _them._   And you swear Def Leppard’s _[Rock of Ages](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_niymhcabGQ) _ just starts playing in your head like a god damn hymn.

 _Customs baby, from that place Boot Star.  She used to use them for this strip show but the heels were too shallow... tch, these bitches would set you back an easy five hundred if it weren’t for your darling friend Solly,_ says Solly boastfully as you pull out the red cowboy boots, _but just for you, they’re a present, no cost.  Cherry boots for a cherry baby, hmm?  I couldn’t pass them up._

Holy fucking shit.  They’re the most rock ‘n’ roll things you’ve seen in your entire life.  High detail, bright red, genuine leather.  The soles are hardly even scratched.  You try to imagine who Nadia is and just what she looks like but the images just slide over your brain and before you even register what you’re doing, you’ve planted your ass down on the end of the bed, the couple giggling at you, and stripped your boots off to try them.  Your socks are full of holes, which Solly tuts at, but you ignore her and get them on.  Then just sit there a minute, dumbstruck, your legs held out in front of you as you stare at them.  They fit _perfectly._

 _You like them, baby?_ asks Solly, knowing you do, and you nod.  The couple giggle and clap for you, and Solly ruffles your hair playfully and closes the box, passing it to you.  _Now you can be a real rock ‘n’ roll star._

 _Or a stripper,_ offers one of the people in the bed, and Solly waves them off.

 _Yes yes, but I think we’d all prefer the rock ‘n’ roll one.  There’s not much difference anyway.  Still selling yourself... All right, jevo, off.  Get off.  I gotta start cleaning this trash out of my house!_   And she flaps the sheets over the couple, grinning at their laughter.

And damn you, you help her clean the whole house, you’re so mystified at this kindness.  But you don’t take the boots off, not even once.

So it wasn’t so bad.  You still have somewhere to stay.  You are determined now, to follow through on your promises for the weekend – and between helping Solly out and busking on the street you hunt out the old haunts, the clubs the Dead Boys kids used to hang around, and sure enough you find them again, like you always do.  They’re surprised you’re alive and try to sell you heroin, and when you probe them as to who died, they avoid the subject until they eventually sorely tell you it was Lani.  Bad batch of brown heroin and – that’s not fair.  Lani didn’t deserve that.

Though it stings your heart with sadness you push it down and wash it into your stomach with a burning gulp of whiskey from a flask one of the boys offers you, noticing your wince of pain.  I mean, at least it wasn’t Micky, right?  Still it bites.  There’s only one way to get rid of this pain, and it’s – no, not _heroin_.  God.  As if you can afford that bullshit.  It’s rock ‘n’ roll, duh.

The reason you’ve looked for these boys in the first place is they’re sure to know the perfect gig to take Erin to.  The most rockin’ joint in the whole city.  They play along with you, mostly out of pity, throwing around ideas on the _coolest_ gigs that are coming up this weekend.  The Roxy.  The Troubadour.  The Water Club.  Scream.  They take you down the Sunset Strip, pointing out the flyers that line it like confetti.  The Whisky.  Gazzarri's.  The Dolphin.  But the flyer for you is found in the carpark of the Rainbow, the text handwritten, printed on bright pink paper:

**A ROCK N ROLL BASH WHERE EVERYONES SMASHED**

**TWO FREE ADMISSIONS WITH THIS FLYER**

**●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●**

**SNAKES**

**● and ●**

**BARRELS**

**●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●**

**The Cathouse, Saturday 9:30 PM.**

The boys all agree that Snakes and Barrels are a very cool band at the moment, if a bit on the junkie side, and the Cathouse is a cool venue – Lita Ford vomited all over the bathroom there one time, which is, you’ll have to agree, pretty fucking cool.  Most importantly the gig is free with this flyer and all the other flyers are gone.  This is a lucky find, an _auspicious_ find, and the livid rose paper goes with your hair and your boots, and the boys all look at you and agree that if you and your friend dress skanky enough the doormen at the Cathouse won’t even question your age.  You look up at them with glee, folding the flyer carefully with your stiff fingers and stowing it in your jacket pocket with reverence.  This is the one, you can fucking feel it.  You’re gonna go see Snakes and Barrels.

This is Thursday afternoon and waiting for Erin outside the gates to her school, watching pretty girls in grey uniforms and big hats pass you but not interested in any of them before she appears, and then it's Hanoi Rocks on your Walkman, the headphones shared between you as you hold hands and walk to the diner.  She love love loves your new boots and kisses you.  You buy her a strawberry milkshake with the money you have earned from your busking and show her the flyer, spreading it in front of her on the shiny silver diner table, and everything is grey or pink, the milkshake, the flyer, her blushing cheeks.  Yes, she wants to go – she’s dying to go, clutching her hands to her breast, all flushed and heavenly when she looks at you.  It’s decided, you’re going to dress up and go.

And then this is a vignette, and this song is _[Heaven Must Have Sent You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbTgd4fQo5c)_ , this tacky old Motown record in the dressing room of the Swan as Solly twirls you, tries to teach you how to dance ahead of your big date, laughing at you as she swoops down from on high to grab your slight hands and force you into leading – or endless fussing over wardrobes, this idea of a girl that you have.  You tell her you’re not sure Erin knows how to do rock n’ roll makeup like you do.  You’re not sure she has any rock n’ roll clothes.  The boys have told you that you’ll have to dress _skanky_ – what if she can’t do that?  Solly just laughs at you, though, and invites you to bring her back here and between herself and the girls they’ll sort something out.  And for you?  There must be an in-between, a line to walk between skanky and masculine – it must be there. 

You’re basically sleeping in those boots at this point, so those, at least, are for certain.  And on Friday night, you lie there on Solly’s couch on your back and feel messed up inside, staring at the dark ceiling, and then you tear the bandages off your fingers.  You can bend them, though they’re stiff.  That’s good enough.  That had better be good enough.

The night arrives.  Saturday.  Heading to Erin’s house that afternoon you’re all wound up like fishing wire around a reel, tangled up inside, like your pulling yourself there.  Because what if she hates it?  What if she’s changed her mind.  But she greets you at the door with a light kiss, taking you by both hands and leading you inside.  Here’s her silhouette ahead of you down the corridors of that massive, empty house, her hair floating around her shoulders and a white dress that licks around her calves like pale fire.

You think at first that this is too long and too decent, as she tells you she has pulled it out of her mother’s closet and is looking now for something to compliment it – yeah, you end up in her parent’s bedroom and looking over a mess of clothes chucked onto the floor, a walk-in wardrobe gaping open, a jewellery box gutted and lying open on the carpet amongst all the clothes.  Erin plays with shawls, wrapping them around her shoulders as she poses for you and dances around you, fishing them up from the floor – her mother’s from the seventies, from the sixties.  Fur.  Linen.  A black blazer with oversized shoulders that hangs off her comically as she draws near and looks up at you under her eyelashes, pecks a kiss on your lips, or pulling a white tasselled shawl over your shoulders to the beat of the tambourine in a T.Rex song on her record player, dragged in here. 

Then she’s raising her arms before you to the huge build of a Styx song, _[Come Sail Away](https://youtu.be/e5MAg_yWsq8?t=2m17s)_ , and when the shawl falls back from her shoulders you can see it - that the dress is ridiculously form fitting, so much that her shyness overcomes her and makes her hide behind her hair, giggling, and fold her arms in front of her chest.  Her shoulders are left bare by the narrow straps on the dress and she is beyond self-conscious, but she can hardly imagine how perfect she is to you right in that moment.  With her blonde hair, the gorgeous dress, the silver necklace around her throat – god, she is so beautiful.

 _What do you think?_ she asks, and you think she’s perfect.  You tell her so, starstruck, and she barely believes you.  But oh, she says she has a surprise for you, too, going through her mother’s jewellery box again and dropping down beside it to pick through the little shards of precious metal.  Another surprise – a very lucky week for you, it would appear. When she surfaces she approaches you and asks you to put your hands out, and she places something in them, curling your fingers over them before you can look at what it is.  When she allows you, you open them to look, and it’s hoops – gold hoop earrings, fine and almost certainly real, and you thank her with awe.  You could never buy these in a decade, and her she is just giving them to you, letting you drink her parents’ liquor and drown in their bath. 

One problem, though.  Your ear piercings closed up years ago.  You’d have to get them re-done to wear these – Erin laughs at you, says that’s okay.  You can do that together later.  Like _what?_ you ask, and she assures you she’s pierced her friends’ ears before.  It’s simple.  But you don’t have time for now, so you join the hoops together and pocket them for safe-keeping.

Together, then, you take the bus back to the Swan.  Leading this beautiful girl through the night streets, the shawl covering her and her hand clasped in yours, you feel so magical like you could be walking on glitter or gold, not the stained pavement of the Boulevard.  Erin is starstruck, she’s never been out here alone – or, well, sort of alone – before – not out into the L.A. nightlife for anything but theatre with her parents, and now she’s wandering out here between the strip clubs and the porno dens hand in hand with a boy, the rock ‘n’ rollers and the pimps passing you on the street and eyeing you as you pass.  But hand in hand and with your street knowledge you’re basically immortal.

You take her to the back door of the Swan, her purse swinging by her side and her big blue eyes on every shadow in the parking lot – the very dumpster that you collapsed in, everything strange and frightening to Erin as she clutches your hand.  You square up with new resolution to the stage door, and when it opens to Solly and a few of the other girls – expecting you – you stare them down, daring them to say anything.

Solly looks at the two of you, her eyes widening as she takes you in, and Erin’s hand tightens in yours.  There’s a wordless moment, then Solly gives a short little breath and draws back, holding up her finger to hold you silent.  _Just hold on one moment there, baby,_ she says to you, then to Erin with gentleness, _honey_ , and she closes the door on your faces.

Like, what the fuck!  How fucking rude!  But you decide to give her a moment’s doubt, pulling Erin close to you, and as you stand there you think you can hear Solly’s voice through the door.  You and Erin exchange glances, and you put your ear up against the door to eavesdrop.

What you hear first is Solly squeal.  And then: _Oh honey hold me!  He’s holding her little hand... oh my god, give me strength... oh no, it’s too CUuuuUUUuuuTE!  Babies!_

You stand back, glare at the door and then kick it.  You’re not _cute._   This is, like, _true love_ or whatever, it’s like, totally torturous and not cute at all.  The door is opened again by one of the other women, gesturing you in off the street, and Solly is fanning herself and trying to swallow back whatever weirdness has possessed her.  _Babies... come in, come in... oh god, look at you..._

The door is closed behind you and Solly fronts up to Erin, looking her over and taking her free hand as she stoops to her level.  _Ain’t you just the most precious... but this hair..._ and she flicks her fingers through Erin’s blonde locks, the girl recoiling in shock, _We have to do something about this, baby.  Come through, come on – both of you.  Get out the hairspray, Marie.  We gonna need the industrial shit._  And she claps behind you, chasing you down the corridor to the dressing room.

Once you’re there the women separate you, lead by Solly, to fix you up for your date.  It feels a little like a prom you missed out on – being fussed over, women pulling at your hair and slathering makeup on you with orders from you, trying to describe with no visual aid what Nikki Sixx looks like.  _Like, cats’ eyes, but like, dark grey, like steel, on the lid there... and the eyebrows and stuff, yeah._   What they leave you with is extravagant but good, with ghastly pale foundation, devilish eyes in black and glitter and blood red lips, your hair teased up like a scarlet bomb has exploded in your mind. 

They decorate you with chains and necklaces, bracelets, rings, sparkly scarves, one of these tied around your forehead to keep your fringe up just like the Crue.  Girls jog across the room in their heels to give you too-tight faux-leather pants, a black blouse with white polka-dots, a big biker jacket made for stripping with the badges of a local outlaw gang sewn into it and huge fringes hanging from the arms and back.  Red leather motorcycle gloves to match your boots – and the end result looks just like a rockstar, as you pose in front of the mirror, admiring your own trashiness, the amount of skanky only an entire floor of strippers can muster up.

Solly claps for you, cooing over you – she darts between you and where they hold Erin captive, something devastating happening behind the mirrors to squeaks and jets of hairspray.  You dread it, of course – because what if she hates it?  She must hate it, right?  But they won’t let you see her until they’ve finished, and there’s no screaming so it can’t be too bad.  After too long, the hand on the clock creeping towards nine with your eye glued on it and your red lips touched to the end of someone’s cocktail while she’s not looking, they finally free her and let her come find you again.  And the result just knocks the breath out of you.

They’ve teased her hair into this huge porno-babe aura, with curls ironed into it, flowing over her bare shoulders.  More necklaces, a black velvet choker, a silk scarf looped around her neck hanging loose to the collarbone to make her feel more decent, and the makeup is sparing but effective, with white eyelids, dark eyelashes, and cherry red lips.  She clutches her purse in front of her with one of Solly’s black velvet jackets draped over her shoulders, and a fucking black beret perched on the puff of blonde hair – and heels, they’ve gotten her somehow into these black suede platform boots that are right off the stage, and she stands taller than you even with her shy folding away.  But she smiles at you, and as you take her hand again, resting pale against your red glove, this song is _[Edge of Seventeen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UeyUuxmGK8)_ , powerful against the night.  And you’re gonna fucking rock.


	9. Riki & Taime's World Famous Cathouse

And so.  The Cathouse.

You arrive with fifteen minutes to doors, but the line is down the fucking street.  Even though you’re, y’know, overwhelmed enough to just stand there in the queue drinking Mad Dog out of a flask in your jacket and clutching Erin’s hand, the line is impatient and within moments of joining you’re squeezed between two lots of douchebags – in the front, three lady douchebags, in the back, four dude douchebags.  All seven of them are smoking and it makes your throat itch for a cigarette yourself, and Erin is eyeballing them on either side in horror, and you can hear music from inside the venue, and god damn!  Every time someone so much as moves towards the front of the line the whole thing sways against the wall of the club, and then crushes in tighter, sandwiching you between them.

But you’re a good boy when you have to be and, hey, for Erin you want to be.  Until someone steps on your new boots, one of the dudes, and even though he turns around to say, _Uh, sorry, babes,_ you’re already going off at him like a sat‑on cat.

_Watch where you’re fuckin treadin there, douchebag!!!_

_Pickles!_ squeaks Erin, holding on to you as you rile up, and the dude looks down at you with only slightly daunted amusement.

_What the fuck, fuckin Yooper chick!  Check this out, Dave!  Fuckin Yooper chicks!_

_Um,_ says Erin, who isn’t a Yooper chick, and the dudes are all jeering down at you now, and you rear up at them.

_Somethin’ wrong with that hey?  What the fuck’s the matter with that?  Also: not a fuckin chick, ya DOUCHEBAG._

They laugh at you, and you immediately see red and shove the first guy in the chest, pushing him back into the queue.  You can feel Erin’s hand slip off of your jacket as the one called Dave grabs you by the collar, lifting you onto your toes as he yanks you up to his level by the front of your shirt.  _Fucking, crazy little yoopette,_ he sneers at you, but the women who were crushed against your other side have decided to take notice now.

 _Hey!  What the fuck’s your problem?_ snaps one of them, turning in her high heels and ashing her cigarette into the street.  Your toes scrape at the pavement underfoot as you try to wrestle out of Dave’s grasp, and Erin cowers against the wall between you.

 _Back off, bitch!  This has nothing to do with you stupid whores!_ barks Dave back, and your heel touches the ground.

_Oh you did not!  Put her down!_

And just as you manage to tug out of his fist, the chick immediately behind you slaps him in the face.

Then you’re flattened against the wall with Erin, looking up as the two groups start to go claws out at one another, whispering to her, _woah, shit_ , as Dave tries to wrestle off a woman digging her nails into his chin and mouthing off at him over calling her a whore.  You know that kinda language is offensive to like, chicks in Wisconsin but those chicks are like... religious.  Pretty much every woman you’ve met in L.A. _has been_ a prostitute so like... it shouldn’t really matter, right?  But they’re fucking going for it.  And soon the bouncer’s shadow falls over the line like an omen of death.

 _Ladies, ladies!  Knock it off!  Jesus!  Gen’lemen!  I am NOT paid enough for this shit!_   He manages to pull back one of the girls, holding her by her upper arm with his hand held warningly in the middle of Dave’s chest.  _What the hell is going on down there?_ he asks, squinting at them, _we’re sold out, okay?  What the fuck’s even there to fight about!_

Both parties are about to say you, it’s you, you’re worth fighting about, but just as both of them turn to point at the two precocious little teenagers in their midst you’ve noticed your chance and spring forward, towing Erin behind you as you pull the pink flyer from your jacket and wave it wildly at the bouncer.

 _Hey man you gotta let us in you gotta, we got a flyer and everything, you gotta let us in!_ you yell at him, and the bouncer straightens away from you and the pink slip fluttering madly in his face.  He snatches it off you as the two parties on either side of you glare and brings it up to analyse in the low, flashing lights of the signs above you on the boulevard.  You can swear you hear the compare inside talking about the band and fuck, _fuck_ , you gotta get in there! 

Erin is standing anxiously against your shoulder and you tug her out from behind you, standing her next to you as you puff out your chest and try to look as skanky as you possibly can.  When you elbow Erin she weakly tries to pull a pose too, shoving out her chest though she’s gone bright red beneath her makeup.  _They cannot be older than fourteen,_ says one of the women in disgust, and the bouncer lowers the paper to look at you with a frown.  But before he can get a word in, you’ve taken control of the situation, giving the bouncer a gentle shove and dragging Erin into the street in front of him.

_So, that’s our entry hey Mr Doorman and you’ll let us right in yeah?  Aw thanks dude you’re the best you won’t regret this!_

_Kids,_ the bouncer starts to say, following you, and you just keep on walking.  Straight past the queue, staring at you in disbelief.  Erin staggering behind you in her heels.

_Y’know I’m gonna be big news Mr Bouncer I know you know, look, I got connections, and you know I got money, y’know?  We’re friends of the band, y’know, I’m on the door so.  So we’ll just be goin’—_

You’re almost at the door when a thick arm comes down in front of you.  Another bouncer, this one twice the size of the other one, glares down at you.  _What the fuck do you think you’re playin at?_ he grunts at you, and then you’re trapped between the two of them, the queue swaying next to the door, trying to get a look at what’s going on.  _This is the Cathouse, man.  It’s a classy joint.  We ain’t playin any of your street bullshit, kid._

 _We got a flyer,_ you say, boldly.  _So we get to go in._

The two bouncers look down at you, the one who arrested you in the line poised to snatch you up and chuck you out into the street.  But the big one in front of you has eyed you both up, and he suddenly moves, crossing his beefy arms in front of his chest.   _You can go in,_ he says, nodding at Erin, and her eyes pop in shock.  As if your bluff worked.  And you move to pull her inside, until the bouncer stops you with a massive hand on your shoulder.

_I said she can go in.  Not you, buddy._

Oh, shit.  They think you’re a dude.  You’re not going anywhere.

Erin looks between you and the door in terror, not sure what to choose, and so you push her gently towards the door.  _Go, go, go,_ you whisper, _I’ll see you in there, yeah?_   Cuz you want her to see this band.  And the next thing you know you’re watching her white skirt disappear into the dark club, the bouncer graciously standing aside as she passes and the queue erupts into accusations of thinking with the wrong damn head.  And you’re alone, another big hand settling on your arm and pulling you away from the door.

 _C’mon, kid,_ says the first bouncer as he leads you into the street, twisting your head to look after Erin as you’re pulled away, and he gives you a gentle push towards the end of the line again.  Which is like, around the fucking block now.  _You know how it goes, don’t make trouble._

You shoot him an acid glare, but stomp down that way anyway as you try to think of a way to save her.  Because save her you must.  Erin’s never even been in a night club before and now’s she’s alone, in the baddest, most rock ‘n’ roll club in Los Angeles, dressed in next to fucking nothing.  God, you can’t even think about it, it makes your skin crawl.  The queue laughs at you as you trudge back to the end of the line, and it seems to go on forever.  Round the block into a fucking alley, like, god. 

Smelling the bins and the gross, syrupy perfume on trumped up women makes you remember the cockroaches crawling over your skin on that dreadful night at the back of the Swan.  The line peters off here, just a few rockers leaning on the wall of the parking lot and smoking, and you ask them for a cigarette and get a _fuck off_ , _kid_ , and mocking laughter before you squat on the back stoop.  You look up at the wall, high and imposing, impenetrable.  The windows are tiny boxes far above you.  A huge white gate blocks off the stage stairs.  It’s fucking cold – but are you _really_ cold?  Seriously?  In Los Angeles?  Jesus Christ, you’re going fucking soft.

The smell of weed drifts down over you from above, and you can hear voices.  From the roof.  Over the club music, floating down around you.  _Man, for real?  You’re meant to be on stage like, now._

_Aw, c’mon, bro.  They can wait.  Jan is fucked up, it’s gonna be shit either way.  Two seconds won’t make no difference._

_Yeah, I know.  You guys, it’s like herding fucking cats._

_Well, you called it the Cathouse bro..._

_Yeah, you can laugh.  I’m the one who’s gotta deal with them downstairs, y’know.  I don’t put a show on every damn day of the week.  I go outta my way for you guys and you just – fuck me over, I swear, Tones.  You don’t give a shit._

_Yeah yeah.  ‘S not my doing, bro.  Take it up with Jan._

Voices on the roof.  That guy with the slow, deep voice, he was in the band – that meant they weren’t on yet.  Voices on the roof.  Smoking weed on the roof... you’re looking up at the wall, the gutter.  The gutter... and then you’re looking at the gate.  And then down the back street, making sure you’re not being watched as you rise and edge towards the security gate.  From out the back you can hear the club’s PA turned down and the compare’s voice over it as you jump up to climb the steel bars of the gate and snag the gutter with your left hand, hanging off it.  Can’t make out what he’s saying, but you can make out the booing.  The smell of weed from off the roof. 

Once you’ve got a hand up, you follow with an ankle.  You’ve always been flexible and this kind of stupid gymnastics is a cinch for you, squirming your skinny body up onto the creaking gutter and then onto the edge of the roof.  You’ve barely hooked your fingers up there and you can hear a thud from across the roof, like someone dropping into a hatch and back into the club.  But no bang.  The music still loud.  When you haul your body over the edge, your body rushes with relief and adrenaline to see the roof access hatch sitting wide open.  You’re almost moved to say a prayer, but instead you just pull your boots up onto the roof and let out a wild laugh of triumph.  Fuck God!  This is rock n roll.

You are across the roof like a shot and slip down into the hatch, boots first, into the dark.  You’re in a short, narrow corridor, painted with white walls, the paint peeling and swelling, and stained carpet underfoot.  Everything smells of weed, like your saint has left a trail in his wake; there are doors ahead of you, and a stairwell at the end.  You can hear the compare’s voice muffled through the walls: _Okay folks, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for... it’s – hey, don’t throw fucking beer at me.  That’s not cool, man – who the – actually hey, throw beer, go on, buy more beer, I need to run a business right?  Ha-ha, but man, seriously, not cool.  Anyway, guys, it’s – you know who it fucking is.  Who else could it be._

The door at the bottom of the stairwell reads: TO STAGE.  You stand in front of it a moment, listening to the crowd booing at the compare.  He says:  _It’s motherfuckin’ Snakes and Barrels._   And then they scream.

Your hand has barely touched the doorknob when Riki Rachtman of Riki and Taime’s World Famous Cathouse himself slams open the door in your face and sweeps you into the wall of his club, cursing under his breath as he stomps up the stairs still dripping beer from his ungrateful patrons and yelling out _TAIME!_ before he disappears around the corner without even seeing you peeling off the wall in shock.  He’d gone to slam the door but you managed to catch it just in time, slipping out into the dark side of stage and off into the gutters before anyone can catch you.

(You won’t think anything of this until you’re talking to your brother again, fifteen years later, and you’ll mumble something about _well, y’know, Riki says_ – because by that point you’ll be friends with Riki, and you’ll laugh about this later and banter about domestic python breeds, which ones are the best for draping around strippers’ shoulders with him and Tony, as pythons are a shared passion between them – and you’ll say that and your brother will be like, _what, Riki Rachtman?  From Headbangers’ Ball?  Oh man, remember that guy?  What the fuck even happened to that guy?_   And the point is you’ll know, because you’ll still be friends with Riki even though you haven’t talked since your last visit to L.A.  And that’s the first point it’ll hit you that like, Riki is big news to some people – he was a part of your brother’s adolescence, watching MTV stuck in fucking Tomahawk.  Riki is a part of your adolescence, too.  But it’s not the same.)

And so this song is _[Heavy Thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLKFMxcCcic)_ , and it’s by Snakes and Barrels.  _And_ , not N’, because the cunt at the microphone isn’t you right now, it’s a guy called Janus Kudzinowski, better known as Janus Pistol, with stringy black hair and the sweat pouring off him and soaking his Cathouse t-shirt and tight blue jeans as he howls into the microphone.  The deal is that Janus Pistol was in another band, called the Hollywood Guns, with a guy called Snizzy Snazz Bullets, currently shredding on stage.  The other guy on stage, Sammy Snakeskin – as he was known then – used to be in a band called L.A. Python along with Tony DiMarco, currently playing bass and previously smoking on the roof, and some other dudes, and all of them had come together into one big band they called Snakes and Barrels – gun barrels, you get it? – in 1985, until the rhythm guitarist got arrested so now there’s just Sammy and Tony and Snazz and Jan.  And soon there won’t even be that.

But you won’t know this until 1988, as it happens, long after you’re embroiled in their mess yourself.  Right now, Snakes and Barrels still has an and, and Janus is still draped out over the microphone in bangles and feathers and pallid with the dope, and the only thing you can think as you plummet offstage into the crowd is Erin, lost somewhere in the debauchery that sprawls in front of you.  Now you know Erin and as much as you’d like to think she’d be right at the front you _know_ she won’t be.  So you elbow through, hopping with excitement like a fawn through the forest as the speed guitars chase your progress through the jumping crowd, getting splashed with beer, until you hit the bar, shoved against it by the packed audience. 

It is too loud to scream anything at the bartenders.  So you look down the bar one way, and then the other, and then you see the ladies’ room, and that’ll be the deal, right?  So you shove your way through to it and kick through the door and there’s two women here, and they must nearly be taller than Solly in their heels, dressed in barely anything but studded leather vests and latex pants, and they’re snorting cocaine off the bathroom counter.  You stand shocked by them for a whole second and then you yell out, _Erin!_ and a sobby, _Pickles!_ answers you from inside one of the locked stalls. 

When your red cowboy boots appear at the bottom of the cubicle door she unlocks it and lets you in.  Yeah, she’s okay.  She’s been sitting in here on the toilet lid crying since about fifteen minutes ago, when the third guy who tried to buy her a drink also groped her and pulled hard enough to hurt.  She had run away and locked herself in here, but to your surprise you see she’s kept the drinks, or one of them – she’s already drank one at the bar before the band started, she says, she didn’t want to but she kinda felt like she had to.  You hold her hands while she tells you all this, and then hold her to you and kiss her softly, because you’re here now and you’re so so sorry.  It’s okay now.  You’re here, at the Cathouse, and you’re together.  And you neck the beer she held on to over her shoulder while you hold her close.

You dry her tears with the scarf around her neck, her eyeliner run at her cheeks.  You say to her, _we can’t miss this band, babe.  They’re so good, c’mon.  You gotta see ‘em.  Please babe, c’mon,_ and eventually she does.  Holding your hand, she follows you out of the bathroom again, back into the club.  Snakes and Barrels are playing a different song, one with an [acoustic intro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8yNa-dQ_0c) that the audience sings along with – one of the few that you will be expected to carry on in the future.  The lead singer’s voice is strong and beautiful against his slur as he hangs off of the microphone stand, and the audience hold cigarette lighters aloft until the electric guitars come crashing down across the song like a burning bridge.  And it does  _burn._

Although Erin is hesitant, you dive into the crowd with her on your heels, using your slight frames to dart through the gaps until you’re nearly at the front.  And then pushing with your shoulder, Erin shoved against your back and squeaking, until you’re slammed into the barrier and face to face with a security guard.  Erin follows shortly after, her face white with terror, and above you towers Snizzy Snazz Bullets, ripping through a shimmering solo on his white Les Paul.  You’re in love.  Not with Snazz, gross.  With the guitar.  Oh, dude.  It’s such a beautiful damn guitar.  But wouldn’t it be more beautiful if it was a Goldtop.  Wouldn’t it be more beautiful if it were you.

  _When dreams don’t come true!_ wails the singer, his eyes screwed closed as his spit and sweat is lit up in the stage light in a spray, _when dreams don’t come true for you, baby!  You gotta... you’re fallin’..._ and then the impossible happens.  He falls.  For real.  From clinging to the microphone stand he goes down, stiff like a corpse, hitting the stage with a thump.  The band continues to play, just looking down at him thoughtfully, because he _did_ just say he was falling.  But he doesn’t move, cowboy boots sticking up in the air, and even when Snazz drops the song and plays the little riff from [_Merry Go Round Broke Down_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKV-spI_0wg) to bait him he gets no more than a twitch.

 _Oh, Harriet!  Here we go again!_ coos Snazz as the drummer follows his lead into the stupid cartoon song, and the bassist sidles over and kicks the singer in the side with a long-legged swing, still plucking along with the bass. 

 _Janus, get the fuck up, you lazy cunt,_ he sneers into the microphone, and Janus gets as far as his elbow before he falls back again, his back arching against the stage floor.

 _Scuse us.  Jan is havin some... technical difficulties...Tony... you on top of that...?_ says Snazz into his microphone, eyeballing his bandmate on the floor, and he makes eye contact with the drummer and starts playing this funny little thing on his guitar, a familiar riff, as the drummer drops the speed and taps the tom along with him as their bassist slings his guitar behind his back and tries to snatch Janus’ hands.  Snazz is singing into the microphone over his riff and the crowd is laughing and singing along with him.

_I hear Mariachi static on my radio, and the tubes they glow in the dark, and I'm there with her in Ensenada and I'm here in Echo Park..._

But you have never heard this song before.  One day this song,  _[Carmelita](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeb0OI8wXN4)_ , will be playing in a bar in Vegas in the dead of the afternoon and you’ll be trying to go cold turkey, and you’ll put your head down in your hands and weep.  But right now you just take Erin by the hand and hold it above you, between you, and dance close to her like Solly has taught you as the band mock their wasted lead singer and the audience howls along in hysterics:

 _Carmeliiiita!  Hold me tighterrrr!_  
_I think I'm sinkin' down._  
_And I'm all strung out on herroin_  
_on the ou-houu-houtskirts of town!_

Tony manages to pull Janus onto his feet again, and the guy looks like he’s fucking melting as he sways under the stage lights, clutching onto the bassist’s arm for dear life.  _Yo,_ he slurs into the microphone, _you dudes are... cuuuhnts..._ but something about the situation has gotten to him because he’s laughing through his words, the sweat glazing his pale skin and sticking his hair to his face.  You stare up at him from the crowd, at the bloody wounds nested in the crooks of his elbows, and as he’s mopping at his face with a red polka dot scarf he looks you straight in the eye with the maddest look you’ve ever seen on a man.  And it zaps you, that look.  It’s the most rock n’ roll thing in the entire fucking world.

Janus drapes the scarf around the microphone stand and barks, too close to the microphone, _hey hey hey!  This is a Stones cover!_   And it is.  Much easier than the rest, and one Erin knows too.  And the rest of the set dissolves like that, rushing by you to the alcohol and dancing and the light in her beautiful face.

By the end of the set, Janus is curled around the microphone stand again, slumped to his knees on the stage and cradling the mic close to him.  The rest of the guitars drop back and Snazz shortly announces _the-a-the-a-the-that’s all folks!,_ and Sammy plays the end fill and crash for the terrible little _[Looney Tunes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKj0Xg1R00k)_  theme with him, and then they all unplug with a searing wail of their amps until Riki and the roadies race on stage to turn them off.  The last one to leave is Janus, being dragged behind his bassist, and then you’re coming to standing against the barrier as the crowd peels around you and flocks to the bar, looking at Erin’s flushed, love-struck face as the DJ starts up the best and latest rock hits.

You’re breathless.  You can’t believe it.  As you stand there, shell-shocked and with your baby in your arms, and it’s just the best moment of your entire life.  Here you are.  In the middle of it all.  This is _[Teenage Kicks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PinCg7IGqHg)_  by the Undertones, and it’s what you’re dancing to with the girl of your dreams.

Seeing you lingering by the stage, one of the roadies snags the polka dot scarf and throws it towards you, and you catch it in your raised fist.  It’s damp and wilts over your hand.  But shit, it’s the coolest thing in the world.  Erin claps for you, laughing, and you tie it around your neck as a medal of your victory.  And then you kiss her on the lips and you both head to the bar.

It’s a long wait to get served, but you’re so excited you just hold each other’s hand and bounce in place along with the music the DJ’s spinning, staring around wildly at the clientele.  Big hair and barely any clothes is the flavour of the night – there’s Riki leaning on the DJ’s box, and over there is Faster Pussycat, reclining on some pleather seats with some beautiful girls.  Down the bar from you is Janus and Sammy, the frontman slumped on the counter, holding his head while the drummer laughs with the bartender.

But when you get to the front, the bartender takes one look at you and fucking laughs.  _As if you’re twenty-one,_ he yells at you over the music, and when you hold out a note to him he flicks a slice of lime at you.  _Get bent, junior!_   When you don’t budge, he leans over the bar at you and yells, _Or I WILL get security, asshole._   And that has enough of an effect on you, pulling away from the bar.

 _Hey,_ yells Erin to you, _I think I’ve had enough for one night!  We should go home!_ and you clutch her hand and frown at her.  But you’ve barely even started!  That’s not fair!  If she was any other chick you’d just tell her to go home on her own, but like... you don’t even wanna imagine.  So you say instead, _um, maybe you just need some quiet?  Huh?  How about, you go to the ladies and I’ll go – and meet you after, okay?_ which seems like meeting her half way.  Sure enough, Erin nods.  Okay.  You’ll do that.  You do need to take a piss, anyway, and maybe someone will have left their glass and you can get another drink.

So here’s a thing, as you weave through the crowds to the men’s room – it’s actually the first time you’ve dared to go to the men’s, but you’re full of bravado and you push straight in.  It doesn’t look much different to the ladies’, save for the urinals, but god _damn_ it smells different, like walking into a wall of piss.  You immediately gag and cover your face with the tail of sweaty scarf around your neck, and battle your way through the uric miasma to one of the cubicles.  Once you’re in you shut the door and twist the lock, drop your pants, and then almost fall into the toilet bowl as you realise entirely too late that it doesn’t have a seat.  A narrow miss, you perch with your thighs on the blistering cold porcelain edge of the bowl and try to coax yourself to piss, staring at the graffiti on the door and sipping at your flask of wine, listening to the men outside pissing into the urinals and chatting to each other.

When you finally manage to release and let a heavy alcoholic stream hit the porcelain, someone in the bathroom barks out, _you taking a piss in there, dude?_ and laughs at you.  You ignore his voice echoing around the bathroom and concentrate on emptying your bladder, your head swimming woozily.  But the man bangs on the cubicle wall, yelling out, _hear me, faggot?  You taking a piss in there?_ and it makes you jump so abruptly your stream is cut short.

 _Son of a bitch,_ you growl back, and you can see the dude’s boots beneath the cubicle.  Someone else, stinking of weed, enters the bathroom; you can hear his footsteps on the tiles as your antagonist circles around the cubicle, and then his stream of piss into a urinal as he ignores what’s going on.

 _‘Son of a bitch’,_ mocks the guy from outside the door, imitating you in falsetto, _What the fuck, have your balls even dropped?  Get fucked, faggot._ And then he kicks open the door on you, pants down and trapped in the fucking cubicle, the flask dropping from your hands in shock and smashing to the floor, wine spraying like a blood splatter across the tiles.  The lock – it must have been broken, the latch turned but the catch totally missing.  _What the fuck,_ says the guy, who is tall with greasy long hair and a leather biker jacket, and he stares at you as you shrink back from him in terror, covering your crotch.

He opens his mouth and you know he’s about to yell something like, _there’s a fucking chick in here!_ but he doesn’t get more than a word out before the other guy in the bathroom pulls up his zip, crosses the bathroom in two massive strides and punches the fucker out.  You see his face crumple around the pale fist as you scrambling to pull your jeans up, and your saviour follows through with his shoulder, taking the guy straight to the tiles with a crack and standing over him.

 _What the fuck, bro?_ he snarls, getting in a short kick with his huge biker boots, and as you’re sidling around them you realise that this is the same person who saved you on the roof.  And the same person on stage, swinging his bass behind his back, his oily black hair shrouding his shoulders like a funeral veil.  _What the fuck are you DOING?  Fuckin’, man, you reckon he’s a faggot, you just kick into the can with him?_ he growls, and you want to thank him.  You really do.  But you want to get the fuck out more, and slip out before he’s even looked up.

Out the door you go to run for the ladies’ and run straight into Erin on the way across the club, who is running the other way towards you.  _There’s people having s-e-x in there!_ she hisses at you, scandalised, and you shake your head, taking her hands.

 _I’ve seen enough!  Let’s get outta here, babe!_  And you pull her with you as you look for the exit.  There’s none that you can see, the club is so crowded – except a sign with a glowing green light, EXIT, above it, and so you careen straight for that arm in arm with your girl.  Together you fall out through the emergency exit into the back alley and the cold air burns your lungs, and when the door closes on you and smothers the pounding music, you lean against the wall in each other’s arms and catch your breath.

You hold together in the quiet alley, listening to the faint refrains of Alice Cooper through the wall of the club, when the rasp of a lighter sounds and the waft of cigarette smoke floats over you, and a quiet voice coughs beside you from knee-level.  When you look down, slumped against the wall and sitting on his ass, his legs stretched out before him like a squashed spider, is Janus, shivering in the night air and holding a zippo lighter in one hand, cigarette in his mouth, looking up at you with his big eyes, black in the dark.

Wordlessly, he plucks another cigarette from the packet in his hand and holds it out to you between his fingers, pulling the lit one in his mouth out with a hiss of smoke as he exhales, watching you.  You’re cautious, but you take it.  _Sorry,_ says Janus, _Money’s tight.  You’ll have to share,_ but you’re okay with that, and he shuffles around on his knees to light it for you, holding up the zippo and lighting up his face as the flame dances over his fist.  His eyes are blue, actually.  But as soon as the cigarette is lit, they’re back to black.

 _You two were in the front,_ he says, looking up at you thoughtfully, a weird, faint smile on his lips.  When he sees it around your neck, he says, _that’s my scarf,_ and smiles with his teeth, getting to his feet.  He’s of average height, and very handsome in a drug addict way, smelling of his sweat and illness.

 _Are you fans?_ he asks when you nod at him, cowering into each other, and you shrug back.  Janus looks back at the club and laughs to himself, rubbing his shoulders against the cold.  _Damn,_ he says.  He smiles again.  _You goin back in?_   You shrug again.  You were going home.  But it seems like Janus has other ideas.

 _You guys wanna see backstage?_ he asks, sweetly, and you are about to take him up on it when Erin, holding on tight to you, says, _Um, well, we were actually gonna head home..._

God damn it, Erin.

 _Oh?_ says Janus, swaying in front of you.  He says, _Hey, me too,_ very slowly, puffing on his cigarette.  You pass the one you’ve been sucking on to Erin to shut her up, and she automatically puts it in her mouth.  _How old are you?_ asks Janus, and Erin splutters over your reply, coughing hard on the smoke she’s inhaled.

Janus just giggles at her as you try to hold her and soothe her, taking the cigarette back off her.  He wheels around and grabs his glass of beer off the pavement, and offers it to her to drink against her coughing.  Suddenly, you’ve had a better idea – not wanting to get kicked out of Riki’s – and you say to him, _we’re eighteen._

 _You are not eighteen,_ says Janus, grinning wide at you.  _No way!  Shit._ He mimes an explosion going off in his head with his hand, turns around on the spot like a blind dog, and then says, _I don’t believe you, babe.  Either of you.  If it weren’t for those fuckin’ stripper boots I wouldn’t believe you ever been out on your own._

But the less he knows the better.  You stay silent, holding Erin as she drinks his beer, and Janus smiles at you, breathing smoke out through his nostrils.  The night is cold and quiet save for the background alarms and sirens of Los Angeles, the soft crash of music in the club behind you.  And then Janus holds out his hand to you. 

 _You’re goin’ home.  I’m goin’ home.  How ‘bout we go home together?_ he invites, and you glare up into his eyes.  But he’s genuine.  This could be an opportunity – Snakes and Barrels are big, maybe they know musicians – maybe this is how you come to your band.  So you give him a low-five on his outstretched hand, and Janus, surprised, laughs at you before holding it up for the follow-up high-five.  _C’mon,_ he says, _I’ll get us a taxi._

And he does.


	10. Terminal Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or, "the one where erin does not do heroin"

Janus squeezes all three of you into the back of the taxi, with a bit of shoving because he tries to insist on sitting in the middle, unsuccessfully.  What actually happens is you sit on the left and Janus sits on the right, and Erin is between you, clutched protectively against your side.  Janus slumps against the door on his side and smokes out the window, watching you and chatting between you and the taxi driver.  You listen to him when he speaks to you, but he just tells you where his apartment is and asks you where you’re staying.  _Florence_ , you tell him, and the radio croons with Benny Mardones: _But I want you to know,[if I could fly.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWHjJt4833I).._

 _Florence?_ echoes Janus, and he grimaces with a twitch of his cheek.  _Rough place, ain’t it, babe?_   You just shrug, so he makes a vague gesture with his hand, dripping beads and rings, and expands, _Gangs and shit down there.  Streetwalkers..._ and then he smiles, weirdly, and says with an open gesture, _Junkies._   And he bites the nail of this thumb, the red nail polish chipped back to the nail beds.

You look him in the eye, Erin cuddling up to your chest against your leather jacket, and say, _I am a streetwalker._

Janus laughs at you, looks at you, laughs again.  Leans with his arm on the window’s edge, the wind moving his stringy black hair as the taxi speeds up again.  _And I’m a junkie,_ he says.  His clear eyes look hungrily at you as he nips at his nail, and in the bare crook of his arm huddle the little puncture marks that brand him as exactly what he says he is.

There is silence.  The radio plays on.  Janus’ chuckling changes to a crocodile grin, and he ashes his cigarette out the window.  Down the street, someone who has just got ash in their face yells at him as the taxi leaves them stranded.

 _How’s that workin’ for ya?_ he asks, and when you shrug, he leans a little closer.  _You sure you’re eighteen?_ he asks, cocking a black eyebrow, and you shrug again and Erin hiccups and then giggles against your chest.  Janus leans back in the seat, sprawling.  _Yeah, well, I guess you would say that, huh._   And then he tells the driver to turn left, and you’re in a dark part of the city now, though not as ‘dangerous’ as Florence you guess.

Janus pulls you out of the taxi and pays, and leads you up into an apartment building.  It’s dodgy, graffiti all down the brickwork and glass, the concrete stairs inside stink of piss, and worst of all, both Janus and Erin are completely trashed.  Janus at least manages to clasp the stair rail and haul himself up them, his boots falling heavy on the steps and echoing up the stairwell as they fall, but you practically have to drag Erin up every single stair as she falls out of your arms giggling.

This is incredibly annoying but her beautiful face, her laughter, lifts you above the reek of the stairs and Janus singing.  Yes, he’s started to sing, some song their bassist showed him that apparently is about child whores on the Boulevard or something.  He’s got a fantastic voice, and the stairwell reverberates it into glorious refrain, but he’s forgotten most of the words to this song except for the chorus, which he warbles for you:  _[Hot child in the city! ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d02k10Bz6ro) Runnin’ wild and blah-dah-lah!  Hot child in the city!  So young to be loose and on her own... la la all want to take her home... la la la... DOWNTOWN..._ – he belts, clear and phenomenal, and then immediately forgets the next lyric - _la la la la... DOWNTOWN... la lalala... yeah._

What was supposed to be, y’know, making connections, networking or whatever with the lead dude in a band is taking a distinctly horny turn, and you are now sober enough to recognize this.  As Janus leads you down the corridor to his apartment door he’s smirking over you in the proudest street dog way, like he’s won, his junkie fingers clumsy on the lock and scratching it with his keys as he struggles to get it in the hole.  You watch him with Erin in your arms, hanging off of you.  All right.  You’ve only had sex once and you’re pretty sure it sucked hardcore, you’ve got a blank for all your pain and monstrosity, but you’re not some fucking baby.  You’re into heavy petting.  If the guy can’t even get his key in the hole, you don’t trust his fingers near yours.

Anyway, as soon as he opens the door and gets you inside, and the standing lamp on, you’ve got pretty solid evidence he’s flat broke.  Not that you would do it, you know – for money.  But if you’ve done something once – you know – if it was enough money – not around Erin, anyway.  The apartment is crap.  Stained couch and TV with a bent antenna, beer cans all over the floor.  A guitar on the couch, a recorder on the coffee table.  The walls have water damage down the bare plaster, no pictures on them, nothing.  There’s not even a kitchen, just a bathroom tucked around the corner by the tiles and a dark room with a bed looming beyond.

You only cast a glance that way as Janus shuts the door on you before Erin slides too far and you decide enough’s enough, and tow her to the couch, sitting in the corner and hauling her up with you.  She’s laughing and hides her face in your chest again, and if she wasn’t so tanked you’d be worried about being... you know... detected.  But she’s gone.  What a lightweight.  She’s had what, three glasses of beer?  You’re not even buzzing – in fact, you probably need another drink just to feel sober.  So when Janus asks you if you want one, you jump at the offer.

 _Right,_ he says, and staggers to the bedroom, and you swear you hear a fridge open.  A fridge in his room!  Maybe the rockstar life is real.  _Whadda ya want?  I got... beer... I got vodka, got some coca-cola.  Could make you a drink?_

God, that’s the best thing you’ve ever heard.  You say _yeah_ eagerly, and then ask him to give Erin just coke.  While you’re waiting for him to do that, you look over the mess on the coffee table ambivalently, your boot propped up against its side.  More beer cans, babe magazines wrinkled with spilt booze, cigarette lighters, leaflets for gigs – all his own, Snakes and Barrels, glasses and ash trays overflowing with cigarettes, roaches, needles.  Your brow jags up seeing the first hypodermic, just fucking sticking out of a porcelain ash tray like a mechanical pencil, and then suddenly you can see them everywhere.  Dotting the magazines and poking out of highball glasses.  On the floor beneath your feet.  White residue on the magazines, on the plastic shell of the tape recorder.  You pull Erin’s feet onto the couch for her protectively, and she coos at you until you kiss her lips.  It looks like she’s about to fall asleep in your arms.  God, she’s so beautiful.

Janus trips in the corridor on the way back but manages not to spill the drinks, three glasses which he holds in his outstretched fingers pressed together in a triangle, his thumb sticking into one of them as he steadies them.  The glasses are a set of four promotional Coca-Cola glasses with baseball players on the side, which you know because you spot the fourth one full of needles and cigarette butts as he places them down on the table before you and then passes you yours and Erin’s, sucking his thumb dry.  Erin wiggles up further on you so she can take her glass, and she casts only a brief glance over her shoulder at Janus to softly say thank you, then goes back to gazing at you.  What a perfect girl; you kiss her on the lips again, and Janus laughs at you, moving across the room with a jangle of bracelets and necklaces.

 _You are dirty, babe, you are one crazy chick,_ he says and points to you, staggering over an expensive stereo that’s just sitting on the bare floorboards against the wall.  _Gotta put some music on.  Yeah._

He almost falls over as he lowers himself to squat beside the stereo, flipping through the stack of cassettes beside it.  You pipe up, _aw, do you gotta?_ drolly but Janus just chuckles.

 _You don’t wanna do it without any music babe, no way.._.

You roll your eyes.  So this is it.  This doofus thinks you’re a chick and he thinks he can just drag two teenagers, clearly in love, back to his apartment, get high and fuck, like a threesome will just fall into his lap like that.  Well, he’s got his fucking wires crossed hasn’t he?  For one, Erin is fucked up right now, making a face as she gulps back the coke in her glass, and you’re pretty sure she’s a virgin so that ain’t happening.  For two, ew?  With all these needles around?  The place stinks of junkie sweat and kitty litter (no cat in sight, damn it), there’d have to be another Pig Nose on the table for you to even consider it.  And by the looks of this place and Janus’ emaciated figure, his Cathouse shirt hanging off his bony shoulders, he’s not exactly on a rockstar wage.

 _If I wanna do it, period,_ you say snottily, and Janus pouts at you, standing and playing with a tape case, opening it and closing it in his long fingers.

 _Aw, c’mon, babe.  It’ll be fun.  Party with a rockstar._   He wiggles his scrawny hips, flipping the case open and shut in his hands.  _Something to tell your girlfriends about, hey?_   And he winks at you, bobbing to the stereo again.  _You’re already up here anyway, can’t hurt._

You roll your eyes.  Like, maybe.  But you’d rather be the rockstar than be a receptacle for the rockstar’s dick, y’know?

 _Here’s a song for ya_ , says Janus, loading the tape and rewinding it to the start.  _Tony’s obsessed with it.  Classic but... you’ve probably never heard it, babies like you.  Reckon it’s you_ , and he laughs.  Who’s Tony?  The bassist, right?  Sure enough when he hits play there’s a fat bassline, jagged guitar stabs, but he’s wrong about your supposedly limited pop tune education.  It’s the Police.  You know the Police.  The Police is dad music, even in 1987.  And this is _[Roxanne](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T1c7GkzRQQ)._

(One day, when you know who Tony is, he’ll break it down for you – the sublimity of Roxanne.  Sitting in a hotel room with you, playing the bass alone to you as you lie, smacked out, in a fur coat in Italy.  This is how Roxanne is a tango, here the heavy fall, then here the flutter, two dotted quarters and a quarter.  _I know my – mind is made - up.  So put a – way your make – up._   Here’s how to dub it, a simple twist of the note.  How similar those two musical languages are, Argentina and Jamaica.  And then in another life, sitting before a huge dark window overlooking the Alps with a glass of Argentinian wine and Jamaican cigars, a man’s glasses will flash in the lamplight as he shares with you a rare opinion, this cellist, this Andante, and you will be in the rare position of being able to say, _a tango_ , and _see_ , how similar these two musical languages are, Argentina and Jamaica, until he smiles at you – he never, ever smiles – and that will be because of this song.  But it will be too late to tell Tony that, in another life, two lives from now.)

Janus stands, wobbling, and mimes playing guitar.  He mimes singing too this time, rather than opening his pipes, his fingers curling up his imaginary guitar neck, and you can’t help but notice he doesn’t actually know the chords.  Faking it.  Not a guitarist at all.  You guess he’s got Snazz to lean on – though you don’t know his name then, all you know is white Gibson Les Paul and a mad lust for that power, that magic – but you lose a bit of respect for him.

Yeah, okay.  This song is about a streetwalker.  _The Police_ , you say, unable to hide the derision in your voice, and Janus snaps his fingers at you.

_Hey, you got it.  Thought it would pass you by, girlchild._

Yuck.

He struts the four steps to the couch and then collapses down next to you, instantly sprawling.  You can barely disguise the contempt in your eyes as he serenades you, properly this time.  _Roxanne, you don’t have to put on that red light,_ his beautiful voice spiking over the octaves.  Just like that, baby, he says, stretching his arms over the back of the faded red couch, close to you.  _You don’t got a worry, babe.  I’ll treat you right tonight._

You eye him and sip your vodka coke.  His clear eyes are on your lips, and then right into your eyes.  _I wanna make you feel loved_ , he says, softer this time, almost as if he’s pleading with you, _I wanna make you feel… special._   _Like you’re the only girls in the world._   You say nothing.  Erin hiccups, and then giggles at herself.

 _Mister Jan,_ she says, giddy with the drink, _you couldn’t afford Pickles._ It’s the funniest thing you’ve ever heard and you crack a helpless grin at her.  Janus shoos her off with a limp wrist, heavy with his rings and the drugs and drink still in him.

 _Bullshit, child.  I mean,_ and he presses his hand to his chest demonstratively, _Maybe not in cash, but, uh..._ He leans towards you, his heavy-lidded gaze enticing.  _You like... Motley Crüe?_ Something wolfish about his face, sly and hollow cheeked.  You stare at him, your lips on the glass, and then nod.

 _Cool, well, we’re on tour with the Crüe in two months.  I mean, you’re a real pair – I like you two.  You hang around, you could come with.  Backstage every night.  Tour bus.  Our manager would sort everything out for you, food, drink, smokes,_ and he looks straight into your eyes with a knowing bob of his head, _dope.  Real Roxanne... yeah, for real._

You lick your lips, holding Erin close.  _I’ll think about it,_ you say slowly, and Erin squeals with laughter and bats you gently in the shoulder.

_Pickles!_

_What!_ you squeak back, and Erin is laughing at you.

_You’re not serious!_

_Well, it’s the Crüe, babe!_

Janus watches you with a crude smirk, and then says, _so are you guys lesbians or?_

 _Wow, okay,_ you say automatically, taking by surprise by his directness, and Erin boggles at him.

 _Um, no,_ she says.  Janus crooks an eyebrow.

_Just friends?_

_Um._   Erin looks at you for advice.  Okay, hard situation.  Erin wonders if you are lovers or friends, if you’re kissing all the time, and Janus wonders if you’re a chick or not, and they’re both waiting for you to answer this question in a few words.  The problem is, if Janus wants you to be a chick and you’re not a chick – well, this is a dangerous place to be, in his apartment, alone; you don’t know anything about him.  He could go crazy on you.  He could do terrible shit to you, to try and prove it, you might have to – you know – hurt him.  And you don’t want Erin to see that side of you, that balled-fists, blood under your fingernails side of you.  Not yet, anyway.

You finish your vodka coke, stealing seconds, and place it aside on the littered table definitively.

 _Playin’ it by ear,_ you say, and Janus chuckles.

 _I like that.  Pickles, was it?_ he asks, and you nod.  _Rock n’ roll_ , says Janus coolly, grinning at you, and you look to Erin like, told you so, when Janus extends a gentle hand to her.

 _Oh, um,_ says Erin, and she looks to you for guidance again.  You shrug, so she says, _uh, Lita._

 _Lita!_ says Janus, impressed, and you make a face at Erin.  If you were gonna play make-believe then she could have, y’know, not given your real name there.  Whatever.  Janus gestures to himself again.  _Jan.  Pistol.  Think about it.  But we’re here, now – I dunno bout you – but I always like to live in the moment._

He kicks his boots up onto the coffee table and slides down on the couch, digging his fingers into his pockets, searching for something.  Money, you think, hopefully, like maybe you can trick him out of it, but instead pulls out one of those weird little Chinese brocade silk pouches, wrapped up with another scarf and hair elastics holding in a plastic package all together in a little bundle. 

 _P’rhaps I can sweeten the deal,_ says Janus, bobbing his head along to _Roxanne_.  With the bundle resting on his torn tight black jeans, he pulls off the elastics holding it together and unravels the scarf, letting it unfurl on his lap.  The plastic packages inside it hold clean fits, cotton, a lighter, baggies of a light brown substance - one of these which he holds up to you, dangling it from between his thumb and forefinger.  _Don’t have much cash, but I do got this, Roxy._

You eye it.  You know what that is.  Dumbly, you shake your head at him.

 _You sure?_ says Janus, raising his eyebrows and holding it out invitingly.  _It’s good stuff, promise.  We get it from the same dude who does Aerosmith, y’know._

You shake your head again.  Erin stares with wide eyes, clinging to you.  Janus gives in with a shrug and, _well.  Just pipe up if you change your mind_ , pulling down his feet one boot at a time, then snags a spoon from the table and a needleless syringe from the kit and staggers to the bathroom, leaving the rest on the couch beside you.

Erin whips around and clutches your arm suddenly, her eyes burning.  _What is it!_ she demands in a hurried whisper, consumed with curiosity, and you frown back at her.

_Er, you don’t wanna know._

_Oh I do!  Pickles!_   And the way she looks at you, all fire and alcohol, makes you melt instantly.

 _It’s, er - you know._   You wave a hand at it noncommittally.  _Smack.  Horse.  Her-o-in._

Erin’s eyes widen in awe and fear, focusing on you and then turned on the unrolled little package.  _Heroin!_ she whispers, _oh my god!  Like in the Velvet Underground?_   And that is so funny it twitches a smile to your lips.  As though a song could be a movie, or a book - as though heroin could be something fake.  Because in 1987, you won’t have tried heroin, despite the kids in the squats who are hooked on it, despite the track marks on girls at the Swan and on the streets.  It’ll be two years until then - you heed warnings, you take people at their word, you remember Lani well, and you won’t try it until you truly believe you are going to die.  But by then you’ll feel safe in its company.  Familiar.  You will know it so well.

In 1987, despite living in a city ravaged by the drug, Erin has never even noticed a track mark.

 _I thought it was a liquid,_ she says, touching her finger to her lip thoughtfully.  You scoff at her.

 _You gotta melt it first, stupid._   You point out one of the tarnished spoons to her, and she eyeballs the litter on the table in shock, having just noticed all the fits scattered across it.  She takes this in for a second, and then touches your chest urgently, her eyes burning with mischief again.

 _And you said no?  You should do it!_ she urges, grinning at you, _Heroin!  That’s so crazy!_ and you eyeball her back.

_Shit, yeah, it is crazy!  That crap hooks you, babe!  It’s expensive as shit!  I ain’t stupid.  Besides it can kill you!  It killed my friend Lani, for real, like --_

_Oh, come on!_   Still burning.  This insane chick!

_No!_

_You’re no fun._   Erin pouts at you, and you peck her on the lips to distract her, holding her on your lap.  In the next room, you can hear Janus cursing and running the tap.

 _If you’re so desperate, you do it,_ you say, and Erin looks at the package, and then back past you demurely.

_… um… I dunno…_

_Hypocrite,_ you whisper to her, _precocious,_ and then you embrace her, kissing her deeply.  Funny, she tastes kinda like vodka.  She reaches back to put aside her empty glass and instead drops it with a clunk to the floor and you hear it roll over the floorboards, and you realize as her arms wind around you that Janus spiked her drink.  Or maybe he just didn’t remember you said to make it straight - but really, which is more likely?  For you to be able to taste it he must have made it strong.  This explains a lot, but picking up the slur in Erin’s words, you can’t help but feel concerned.

 _I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do,_ she mumbles against your lips, and you hold her gently to you and whisper:

_Good._

Janus staggers back in, tripping over his own feet, with a needle full of water and the spoon cleaned.  He crashes back beside you and kicks out his legs, slumping low, and balances the spoon on his chest.  With the syringe, he fills it with water and then squirts the rest into the air, just missing you and laughing when you flinch away.  Then, with Erin’s eyes glued on him and you holding her close, he goes about the complex ritual of preparing a hit, bopping his head along to the white reggae on the stereo.

He only half-heartedly tries to make conversation with you, asking _you sure?_ again and flicking some cotton at you with a flirty cackle when you flinch at it.  One of Erin’s legs slips off the couch, like she’s half ready to run away before he’s even lit the solution.  When he does, with the slip of the lighter wheel and that pungent chemical smell, that vinegar tearing around its edges, Erin starts to slide off you, her dress sweeping off your lap as her other ankle drags over the couch cushion.  She’s almost on one leg with you looking up at her when her hand leaps to her head, mussing her beautiful blonde curls, and she says, _I don’t feel too good,_ and then almost falls straight down and brains herself on the table.

You grab her just in time, springing to your feet and dragging her to you.  Janus stares up at you with the lighter and spoon in his hands, then purses his lip and twists his eyebrows strangely.  _Um, bathroom’s that way,_ he says, and he boxes at your glass with his lighter in his fingers, _Get her some water?  I won’t be long, yeah?_   Priorities, huh.  Frowning at him, you snatch up the glass and walk her there.

The bathroom isn’t too bad.  Cramped.  By the time you get there Erin is swooning, hanging off you – you swear you feel a shiver as you lower her to the tiles of the shower, getting her to her knees and leaving there to fill her glass with water.  She stays there, her head on the tiles and her legs akimbo, and groans with her head against the cold floor, _I can’t stand uuuuup…_ and yeah, she’s fucked up drunk.  You sit down beside her, your ass on the tiles, and set the cup beside her, stroking her blonde hair to the side of her neck.

 _You all right kids?_ calls out Janus, and you call back, _yeah_ , and Erin moans.  You can hear Janus banging around in the next room, changing the tape to Iggy Pop and kicking the table beyond impatiently, roll your eyes and kiss Erin on the cheek, telling her you’ll be right back.  She just groans, so you remind her of the water and trot out again.

When you get back, Janus is on the couch again with the music blasting and he tilts his head back to meet you, looking up at you.  _You know, Tony hates this song,_ he says, grinning up at you, _Tony hates David Bowie._   You just roll your eyes at him.  What do you care about fucking Tony?  Your time with this band is clearly over. 

 _Tony hates David Bowie because David Bowie fucked his mom… funny, huh?_ Janus smiles cheekily at this, his blue eyes glinting in the lamp light, and says, tied off and inches from sticking the loaded needle into his arm, _so, now are you’re sure?  Now you’ve ditched the angel?_ And you glare at him.  He just laughs at your expression, teasing you with the needle in his fingers.  _No?_

You put your hands out to hold his face, your hands cupping his jaw.  _Just stick it, pussy,_ you spit, and Janus smirks at you before lining up the hit with his vein.  He wiggles defiantly, looking straight into your eyes, and then jabs it into himself with barely a flinch.  And then you’re watching as he injects himself, shuddering at the drug pumping into his veins, and watching him drop off in your hands. Then Erin retches, and you pull away from him, shoving his head gently as you retreat.  You only look back enough to see him fall back on the couch again, head tipped back, his long hair spilt over his chest and neck, as you slip back into the bathroom.

The smell immediately tells you Erin has puked.  _Oh, babe!_ you whinge, and leap for her side, pulling her hair out of her face as heaves again.  She’s crying, of course, but a little puke and salt water never bothered you much.  _Babe babe babe,_ you fuss, stroking her back and holding her hair up, and once she’s ejected as much of the vodka and coke as she can you drag her into a headlock and force the glass to her lips, upending it into her mouth as she gags against the stomach acid and water.  But she drinks.  Drinks, and then clutches you, shaking and weeping at her crappy night.  You stroke her hair, clean off her face with her scarf and abandon it, and whisper to her, _let’s just go, baby.  Let’s just get out.  I’ll walk you home._

Erin nods against your leather jacket, so you take her hands and draw her to her feet.  With careful, trembling footsteps shaking in her heels, you lead her through the lounge, picking through the trash.  And this song would be _I Will Walk You Home,_ but Janus has ruined it with his fucking Iggy Pop album.

So this song is _[China Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BBAEUOOFKQ)_ , by Iggy Pop and David Bowie, and this is Janus with his head tilted back on the couch, eyes closed, needle sticking out of his arm red with his blood.  Something about him shakes you, the paleness to him, the stillness, a real bad low. 

(One day, a man who calls himself Magnus will have this album in the glovebox of his truck, and he’ll fast forward straight to this song and blast it, and tell you it’s about heroin and cocaine, yeah, speedballing man, and you’ll laugh loud and cling to the handle above the passenger window, and then the memories will come back.  With his cracked, off-tune voice, croaking along, _well things have been tough without the[dum-dum boys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ioRWlG9PBQ)… _ and all you’ll be able to think of is the pallid of this idiot’s skin, ten years ago, and how you should not have seen that.  Watching the streetlights pass.  And maybe it was your fault.  No.  It wasn’t your fault.  You were just a fucking kid.)

Standing over him together, you look to Erin for guidance and she’s looking down at him, horrified.  So you laugh.  And you blurt, _idiot!_ , dumb with mirth.  And you grab her hand, and take her back out into the streets.

Your bootsteps clatter down the stairs.  As soon as you hit the road you’re running.  Erin stumbling behind you.  And you catch a glimpse of her then, staggering on the dark road with her hair lit up by the streetlights, her white dress whipped around her spindly legs and tight around her bust, and you are totally in love with her.  And you twirl her around in your arms and you both hit a streetlamp, shoulder on shoulder, and you grab her in a tight embrace and you kiss her deep.  Vomit tongue and all.  It’s quiet on the street, but this song, at last, is Heart’s _[Crazy On You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZuW6BH_Vak)_.

When you pull away, breathless, and she stares up at you just as dazzled and hungry for you, you whisper into the cold air, _Damn it._

Your breath clouding the space between you. The hazy lamplight beaming down on you.

 _I love you._  

And this time you mean it.


	11. Right Next Door To Hell

The next morning, you awake in Erin’s bed again, still in all your clothes and makeup smeared over your face.  Erin is beside you; she’s showered, though, too sick to just sleep on her cold sweat and shivering, and this morning she’s still unwell, deeply hungover, her face covered by the blankets to block the light from her window and groaning when you try to lift them.  She looks so cute, bundled up there like a little burrito, and you call her _burrito_ , rolling your R, and she calls you something very naughty which is the first time you’ve ever heard her swear.  And you’re like, _woah!_   It’s the best thing you’ve ever heard.

But even though she giggles along with you, she tells you that you might as well go home.  She’s not going to be good for anything today, lying face to face with you and her sweet breath tinged faintly with vomit, and the last thing she says before you leave is, _do you think he’s okay, though?_   About Janus.  So you tell her, nose to nose, that he’s a junkie so – it doesn’t even matter if he’s okay.  And it doesn’t matter to you.

This song is _[Redondo Beach](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4iksb1HG9E)_ , off of one of Erin’s father’s tapes, a Patti Smith one, slotted into your walkman before you go walking that way yourself.  By now you’re starting to get a feel for the buses, which ones will stop you and check an expired ticket and which ones won’t bother, so you work your way back towards Solly’s apartment on these a long, weird way, towards the coast from the foot of the hills and then back east down Sunset.  When you walk a leg down Sunset to avoid a particular bus driver, trudging through the night’s detritus and waves of colorful flyers abandoned on the pavement, the street is oddly quiet even for a Saturday morning.  Like something’s changed.  But right then, you can’t put your finger on what it is, exactly.

You sleep all day at Solly’s, and then waste away the weekend between the Swan and Erin’s, laughing with her again before her parents come back – home for a fortnight come Monday, so you have to make yourself scarce.  Once you have braided flowers into each other’s hair and smooched until your lips hurt, the bad night forgotten, you say some teary goodbyes and promise, _promise_ , not to forget each other!  As though it were for years.  This time, it won’t be.  This time it won’t even be two whole weeks before you’re calling her again.

You occupy yourself with helping out Solly, with moving your life forward.  You practice guitar, and when the house band warms up at the Swan, you come down and join them, playing along to their amusement – but once you find your legs with them, once you find the jazz chords they use and learn the songs enough to twist them, barely two sessions, you are rewarded by beaming faces and awe, applause from girls and bartenders and musicians alike.  Yes, you are Pickles and you are impressive; a man who calls himself Earl sits with you at the keyboard and shows you the chords to the songs they play, and then you’re a multi-instrumentalist too.  In Hollywood, you have to be a triple-threat, and now – well, now you can sing and play piano and guitar.  You’re getting it worked out.

Mid-week, you follow the directions on a pamphlet Solly gave you and find yourself in a little room, sitting in a circle with a bunch of strange men and someone called Lou, your boots tucked under your chair and crossed at the ankles – not the red ones, but the old, scuffed up boots as you try to keep a low profile here.  And this is a circle of a dozen men just like you, beings you have never met before, that you never even dreamed you’d have a thing that you were, just one thing that you... were. 

The men are guarded and wild-eyed, in the manner of feral animals, watching for any sign that you might kick them – that you might not be real.  You quickly pick up that they do not think you’re one of them, because of the lines around your eyes – because your hair is still long – because you’re wearing a chain around your neck and bracelets around your wrist, covering up scars, and all this means that you don’t want it the way that they want it.  It makes you feel sick and you cross your ankles, sick that this is meant to be the place for you but still, even here, you don’t belong. 

But Lou has a gentle voice, this man who wrote the pamphlet, and he explains to you what can be done: with the right doctors, with the right surgeons, with the right drugs, you could be just like you’re aching to be.  The only thing that stands in your way is money.  Just money.  So absurd it makes you laugh, bitterly, picking at the holes in your jeans.  So you can’t do anything at all, not until you have money.  But that begs the question, how exactly do you think that’s gonna happen, then?

When you recount this to Solly, she laughs at you too, in a jaded, knowing way that punches right through you and punctures your lungs so you can’t even laugh to shake it off.  She tells you, why do you think she’s in this situation?  Hmm?  Why do you think anyone’s in this business?  You can go out dressed as a man and you get turned away from every job because you look too effeminate, you can go out like a woman even like her, when everything is done and all, and you only last a week before some old savage john rolls up and tells your boss and gets you fired, and don’t even talk to her about before she got her tits done.  Or you can go out on the town and earn $500 a night, just like that, and then why even bother with the pretense?  And that’s what she asked herself, and that’s what’s gotten her to where she is today, _jevo._  

You poke at your dessert glumly, not even having the appetite for the sugar.  Because you can see her reasoning.  You can feel it all the way through you, and how thick that wad of notes was in your hands, and how much easier that punishment was than the other kind, the kind that files down your spirit with everything you try.  But the problem is that you don’t want to have a job, not any kind of job.  You’re going to be a rockstar or bust, you’ll walk into the sea or - something.  But you don’t tell her that part.  Only your plan – that you’ll be a rockstar – and she laughs at you over the table, but promises you: _if you will it, jevo, you know God will send it to you.  He has His ways, did you know..._

And that’s shit you’d just ignore if it came from your parents, you know.  But from Solly, it carries a bit more weight.

So it’s the second week, when you’re starting to starve for Erin.  You’ve never felt like this, the desperation, like you can feel her kisses on your skin lingering, phantom, and you cave and speak to her on the phone from a payphone in the library that morning, getting her for a whole half hour before her parents demand her attention again.  School is fine.  She misses you.  She loves you.  And hearing her say that is the best medicine in the whole world.

When you come in to the Swan that afternoon with your guitar to play with the house band, you’re a bit surprised to find Solly distracted.  You had wanted to tell her all about your phone call and how much you love this girl, but she shuts you up nearly immediately, shushing you, and then informing you that she’s _doing this for you, jevo._   She takes a cigarette out of your mouth and stubs it in an ashtray on the bar, telling you it’s for your own good.  Because she’s doing this for you.  _This is me, putting my god damn reputation on the line, just so you know, hmm?_ So look fucking alive.  She has someone for you to talk to.  And then, just like that, she’s gone.

You sit on the stage and play guitar for a little, looking around for her out of the corner of your eye and sitting on the edge of your stool, but Solly doesn’t come back again.  Instead, after an hour or so, when the regulars are starting to filter in and the band is tuning up proper, a beer-bellied, balding man in a cheap suit, unspectacular from any of the other patrons of the Swan, steps off of the floor and onto the stage in front of you, pulls up a stool from one of the other musicians.  A lit cigarillo is held perilously between his fat knuckles, his whiskey nursed in his rough, gold-ringed fingers.  He must be in his thirties, you think, but you are an idiot at this point and he is definitely in his forties.  The suit is Italian, grey over a salmon pink shirt and paired with loafers and big gold wristwatch.  His beard is scruffy but cropped short, and his eyes – they look like he’s seen a planet die, so tired and jaded with their red rings and bags stacked on top of his full cheeks.

 _You Pickles?_ he says, exhausted, as he pulls the chair right in front of you and you nod mutely, eyeing him with deep suspicion.  He nods, sits down, takes a draw on his cigarillo, and looks you up and down again as he exhales in a heady stench of smoke.  Then he puts his free hand out to you to shake, and only when you take it does he introduce himself, in a sweet voice and a vague British accent edged by his age and smoker’s lung: _R. L. Howard, Esquire, but – call me Howie._ And this song is  _[Crime of the Century](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpAUDOI24Oo)_ by Supertramp – but you don’t know it yet.

 _You know a woman named Solita?_ he asks curiously.  Solita... oh!  Yes, you do.  Howie nods thoughtfully.  _Says you’re on the lookout for a band,_ he says, as though he’s thinking it over himself, and you purse your lips at him and then nod.  Yes, you’re looking for a band – although the Diamonds, the house band at the Swan, are pretty good, you know.  Howie nods knowingly and gets out a cigar tin, flipping it open to offer you a cigarillo.  Lined up in there so perfect and straight.  When you take it, it’s like you can feel Solly glaring at you from the greenroom, just straight through the walls like a laser beam, she’d hate this so much.

 _So tell me how you see yourself, in that scenario.  You know, what do you see yourself doing?_   Howie asks, and you tell him, _well..._ you can play guitar.  Or you can play the piano.  Or you can sing.  But what you really want is a band where, you know, you have creative control, where it’s like... a gathering of equals.

 _In other words, you want to be the frontman,_ observes Howie, and you almost blush at having been caught out.  Well, yeah.  Who doesn’t?

 _You see,_ says Howie, placing his glass down by his foot so that he can light the cigarillo for you, _it just so happens that I have, you know, a complementary problem.  Y’see, I manage bands, I’ve managed bands for years – you know the New York Dolls?  No?  Jayne Country?  Well – anyway.  I have a band, and my problem is that we have this really very big gig coming up, and suddenly, we don’t even have a frontman, I mean..._

You barely even question how they can have a very big gig lined up without a frontman, your eyes are so wide.

 _What happened?_ you ask innocently, and Howie waves you off.

 _It doesn’t matter, shit happens.  But this band’s a big deal, man.  I mean, we’ve got a label deal.  We’re on the edge of recording this thing, place is booked and everything._   He punches his balled fist into his palm with a dull smack.  _And we got these gigs opening at the bloody arena.  So it’s kinda critical, y’know, and if you’re up for it—_

 _Yeah,_ you say before he can even get the last word out of his mouth.  You’re so up for it.

Howie smirks at you and sits back in his chair.  With a flourish, he pulls a card out of his suit pocket – as if he had stowed it there exactly for this purpose.  _Then come audition.  Meet the boys, have a beer.  It’ll be nice,_ he says, and grins at you, winking above his crooked teeth as you take the card from his hands.  Then he simply stands up, takes up his glass again and drops back onto the floor while you read it.

_R.L. Howard Esq._

_Music Management_

And though he has a formal office address and a phone number, he’s also written on it in ballpoint an address in West Hollywood, where you are clearly expected to attend.  You are so sucked into it, wondering what the hell kind of opportunity is this, that it takes Earl smacking you warmly on the shoulder to jerk you out of your daze.  _Ready to go, pal?_ he asks, because you’re going to play with the Diamonds tonight.  And you are, and you do, you know – in five years’ time, no one will imagine you had this whole background in doo-wop and soul until you whip it out at pianos at private parties or in the backrooms of strip clubs to beautiful ladies.  But here it is, and you owe Earl every sweet note you’ve ever sung.

(But he’ll never see a dollar.  And that’s the truth.)

Backstage between costume changes, Solly asks you how it went.  You shrug and hum and _yeah okay I guess._   This concerns her, but she’s too busy changing her eyelashes to really dig deep.  She tells you that Howie is an old client of hers, which you could have guessed, back in town after a tour up to Seattle.  He’s a funny guy.  In what way, she finds it hard to explain.  Well, he’s not always very good with bands, and if he mentioned the New York Dolls or Jayne County to you – the New York Dolls really means the New York Dolls in their solo careers, several of them, and they all fell through so fast that he can barely stand there and claim anything, and they were all junkies in the end.  Jayne ditched him and these days calls him a fucking creep, which could have something to do with how much he likes barking up trees after branches rather than pussies.   _TSes, honey.  Gee, you don’t have to act so thick, jevo._

He’s had some success with his most recent bunch of boys and Solly has, in fact, seen him drag them here, one or two of them, wasted at the end of a night out.  They seem like nice boys, if a bit wide-eyed and, bluntly, pretty fucking stupid.  That might be at the root of his success, since, well, left unobstructed, Howie does have this way of getting things done.  That’s what she means by him being funny, she supposes.  With you being so thick all of a sudden you’ll probably fit right in. 

So the next morning you walk to the phone booth and call the number on the card and get Howie in his office.  He answers immediately and gives you a bit of a spook – he must have been bored.  Together you discuss a time that afternoon to meet _the boys_ , who, Howie confides, are pretty much idle all the time so he doesn’t have to consult them.  He has a car so he’ll pick you up from Solly’s house.  For a second you remember her caution, that Howie has a thing for transsexuals, and you remember the back seat of a car and blood across a window, but you swallow it down your stiff throat and say, _yeah, okay._ And it’s decided.  You’re going to meet the band.

You’re sitting on the steps to the apartment complex that afternoon with your Pigface and guitar when a car that can only be Howie’s rolls up.  It’s a black Chevy Monte Carlo and it’s a beautiful damn car, gleaming in the afternoon sun.  Though Howie opens the passenger door for you from inside and invites you in, you get into the back with your amp and guitar instead, as some sort of self-defense.  _Lookin’ good_ , he says to you, checking you out in the rear-vision mirror, which does fucking nothing to put you at ease.  But you are looking good, you dressed up in all your leathers and levis for this, blacked up your eyes, teased your hair.  Howie looks much the same as before.

He keeps the radio on a rock station as he fights through the traffic of LA.  It’s different, being in an actual car in Los Angeles – it feels cool, and the afternoon sunlight gets in your eyes.  You watch people on the streets through the windows as Howie chats to you about the band, the cool muscle surfer boys, the beautiful women in mini-skirts or power suits.  Rap boys, gangsters, afros, neon, businessmen.  Howie tells you that ‘the boys’ are Sammy, Snazz and Tony, and you’re chewing on your thumbnail and staring out the window when your brow knots a little.  Hang on, Tony?  Wasn’t that Jan’s friend?  Well, you guess they probably all know each other in the scene and everything.  And right at that moment you are being so fucking stupid that you’ll definitely fit right in.

 _How old are you?_ Howie asks, and you tell him, honestly.  He draws his breath sharply and tuts at you.  _All right, first thing, you keep that to yourself, okay?  You’re eighteen from now on._   You look up at him from where you’re leaning on the window and smirk, and you see Howie looking at you in the rear-view mirror again.  _Hell though, you look bloody fifteen.  You better not be lying to me._

 _Just lucky, I guess,_ you tell him innocently.  He flashes you a strained smile in the mirror.

 _I’m sure you are.  Well, it’s sellable, and that’s what I’m thinking, y’know.  It’s pretty tough to lose a frontman, especially with an established act like this.  We’ve auditioned a few guys, but when Solita pointed you out…_ He looks thoughtful, sly, for a moment.  _Even if you can’t play, there’s a lot you can do with a distraction, y’know what I mean?  Slap a bright sticker on it, re-brand it – so long as you can sing, kid._

 _I can sing,_ you say.  You’re listening closely now – what he’s saying is very interesting.

 _A car’s a car,_ he explains, glancing back at you when he stops at a set of lights, _and you can have the best, most beautiful machine in the world.  But a Cadillac is nothing without that little silver lady on the hood.  Now mine’s been pried off by some hoodlums, or however you’d like to put it.  I’ve got a machine, and I’m a good driver._ Howie looks you in the eyes over his shoulder.  _Will you be my silver lady?_

 _I ain’t no lady,_ you say spitefully, but he only gets a taste of your glare before he has to turn his attention back to the road.

 _No,_ he agrees with a chuckle.  _I know, Solita’s explanation was very… informative, I’ll say that.  What do you want me to do with that knowledge, precisely?_

 _Nothing.  Ain’t none of your fucking business,_ you sneer at him.  _I’ll do whatever, I just wanna be somebody._

The car is slowing now, as you turn off of Sunset onto North Fuller.  _Well, if you got the guts, then I can take care of the somebody,_ says Howie, conspiratorially, _trust me_.  He pulls up outside a white picket fence, and indicates for you to grab your stuff.  _Brace yourself,_ he says, quirking an eyebrow.  _It ain’t pretty._

You wonder what that could possibly mean and slide out with your guitar and amp.  The house is far back on the block, white brick and wood with an overgrown yard and fairy lights draped along the awnings like black plastic spiderwebs.  There’s a porch with an overstuffed old couch and a guy sitting on it, smoking, sunglasses, sleeveless shirt, tight black jeans, a bandana wrapped around his stringy blonde hair, empty bottles in a sea around his boots.

As you follow Howie through the gate and down the path, the manager lifting a hand to wave at the guy and the guy hauling himself to his feet to greet him, you have the haunting feeling that you’ve seen this man before.  When he lowers his glasses you realize where.  That blank stare drilled at you from the shadows at the back of a stage just two weeks before, the sweat rolling down his pallid brow now sickly in the afternoon light, swaggering to the porch steps to look at you, then turn for the open door and yell through it.  _Hey, Howie’s here._   You hear a _fuck_ from inside and the man turns back to you, not even sparing a smile, and Howie climbs the steps.

 _Sammy,_ he says cheerfully, and pats Sammy on his bare arm, then gestures back to you, _this is Pickles._   And Sammy juts his chin at you in acknowledgement.  He’s already pretty tall, taller than Howie, and with you down on the ground he stands over you like a tower, cool and stoic.  And though you feel the anxiety simmering inside you, you just jut your chin back.

Howie heads inside the house, kicking cans against the walls of the hallway as he goes, and Sammy leads in after him.  You remember yourself and dart up the stairs and in behind them.  The house is dark, blinds dropped over the windows of every room you pass.  There is a smell.  It’s not as bad as the squat, but it’s still distinct – acrid sweat, spilt beer, vomit, kitty litter and dust.  Howie directs you into what appears to maybe be a loungeroom, and he looks around it like a man in pain and tells you to take a seat before he goes about trying to get some light in there, climbing over a couch to get to the window.  The gloom is dominated by black forms, which you slowly realize as your eyes adjust are, in fact, guitar amps and heads.  You put yours down and sit on one of them, awkwardly.  Howie swears and reaches for the blind cord, missing again.

Elsewhere in the house, you can hear Sammy rousing his bandmates back to life.  You try to remember what they look like but you can’t even remember which band they were in.  You’ve seen a lot of bands really, a lot of shit bands.  Whatever Howie has in mind, grunting and then swearing as he pulls the cord the wrong way and shutters off the light even more, they can’t be better than you are.  Was Sammy from the openers?  Did you even see the openers?  Christ, you didn’t think you were _that_ drunk that night.  But when they actually come in, dragging their heels, you know.

Oh boy, do you know.

Sammy is Sammy.  He sits on a drum stool over near the brick fireplace.  With him he brings a very tall man with flowing brown curls, dressed in a singlet, dank denim vest and brown cowboy boots.  No pants, just his underwear, which is a lot to deal with at this time of the afternoon.  He gets Sammy to open a bottle of beer in his hand with a drum key and then collapses onto the couch beside Howie, taking you in for a second, and then he leans forward and reaches his hand out for you.

 _They call me Snizzy,_ he says as you shake it, _hey._   His hand is big and warm.  Sammy snorts at this.

_They call him Snazz._

_They call me… Snizzy Snazz,_ laughs Snazz, his voice hoarse from chain smoking the night before, and he indicates to Sammy, _and that’s Sammy.  Twinskins._

 _Snizzy Snazz Bullets,_ says Sammy, indicating back to Snazz.  You look between them dopily, and say, _Pickles,_ and they both nod.  Then in tandem, they both indicate past you with their open hands and say, with much ceremony, _Antonio DiMarco Thunderbottom._

And standing in the doorway there he is.  A fucking vampire, white as white, his eyes covered by sunglasses even in the dark and shrouded by his long black hair, a joint in his lips, shirtless, his jeans open at the fly.  Tony.  Tony, who saved your fucking life in that bathroom a fortnight ago.  Tony, weed smoker, reggae lover; Tony, who hates David Bowie because David Bowie fucked his mom.  Isn’t that fucked up, how much you already know about this guy and he doesn’t even know what you look like?  He tries though, lowering his glasses to peer at you, but this is the exact moment Howie gets the blinds open, and Tony disintegrates as soon as the sunlight touches him.

Nah, just kidding.  He’s not happy though, yelps and covers his face with his forearm.  _What the fuck, man!_ he yells, and Howie says sorry though he clearly isn’t, sliding down from the couch to stand over you again.  Once he’s cussed his manager out and blinked himself into reality, Tony takes his seat beside Snazz, but not before he tugs the blinds half-closed again.  _Pickles, was it?_ he grumbles, sinking into the weathered leather skin of the couch.  You can’t tell if he’s even looking at you with the sunglasses over his eyes, but you nod anyway and he groans in response.  _Yeah, ‘kay._

There’s an awkward silence between all five of you.  At this point in your life, you will have no idea how to act in a room full of men – in fact, it’ll turn your stomach to be here, surrounded, no escape.  You’ll get used to it eventually, and you’ll learn that none of these men (well, almost none of them) have any ill intent to you.  They’re safe.  But you don’t know that yet, and it could have so easily been any other way. 

They’re also distracting, like – not distracting like the top-heavy ladies at the Swan, but still distracting.  Through the open sides of Snazz and Sammy’s tops you can see their muscles, and Snazz particularly has a snake-like sensuousness to him, his full lips, his thoughtful, intelligent gaze.  Sammy is dumber and more like a dog, but he too is beautiful, in a blank way.  Tony looks like a hairy, pale sausage in the position he’s in, sprawled down the couch with his head crushed at a right angle against his chest, but even like that you can see the tenseness of his abs totally exposed.  It’s weird, and you have to fight not to stare.  But staring there is still better than Snazz’s underwear, which are distracting in another way entirely.  Yuck.

 _Pickles,_ says Howie eventually, standing over you proudly, _is a guitarist at a soul club on the Boulevard._

He’s clearly about to go on but Tony cuts him off.  _Yeah?  Which one,_ he rumbles, and Howie sniffs at him.  A bad idea in here, the puke smell is only stronger.

 _The Swan,_ he says with restrained reluctance, and Tony shrugs stiffly.

_Never heard of it._

_Right._   But you can tell Howie is relieved.  Clearly it has a reputation.  _Well, he’s a guitarist.  He’s looking for a band.  You should give him a shot._ Howie rests his hand on your shoulder, and there’s silence again, until Sammy leans forward on his stool.

 _How old is he?_ he asks, thoughtfully, like he’s picked you.  And maybe he has.

But, _he’s just turned eighteen,_ says Howie quickly.  You don’t really like being talked about in third person, so you say, _yeah.  I’m eighteen._   They all look at you.  Another silence.  This is actually excruciating.

 _The fuck is that accent…?_ asks Tony very slowly, his eyebrow lifting like it’s all he can move right now.  You almost wouldn’t answer that kind of bullshit, but Howie is looking at you expectantly now.  He can’t answer for you, and they’re all waiting.

 _It’s, er, Wisconsin.  I’m from Wisconsin.  Tomahawk, Wisconsin._   Four pairs of ignorant eyes stare back at you.  None of them know where Tomahawk is.  _It’s – you know Green Bay?_   Silence.  _Um, well, it’s… it’s north, like… yeah._

 _Sure,_ says Tony.  Silence again.  You look around the room, at the sleepy faces blinking out of their hangover stupors and crossed by bars of light from the blinds, at the band posters haphazardly tacked to the peeling walls.  You wonder where the cat is.  There’s that kitty litter smell.  So there must be a cat, right.  Shit, this place is kind of a maze.  They must have great parties here.  But if you wanted to get out it wouldn’t be easy.  So much shit to trip on and then you’re right next to the strip, right?  And then your mouth is just like, moving on its own.

 _I heard you, like… lost your singer,_ you say, and the men shrug and grunt and mumble.  _Jan,_ you remember aloud, _Janus, right?  Janus Pistol.  Yeah, yeah, that’s it!  Janus, Snakes n’ Barrels, yeah.  Janus, man.  What a fuckin’ junkie, am I right?  Heh!_

Howie is eyeballing you now, but you don’t even know why.

_You can’t trust ‘em.  I know, right, I lived with junkies down at the squat, you can’t fuckin’ trust ‘em.  What happened, anyway, did he steal some of your shit or – you had a fight, right?  Yeah?  I mean you wanna be careful if you ain’t seen him, cuz he might be just overdosed in a ditch somewhere, heh –_

_He’s dead,_ says Tony suddenly, and you shut your mouth.  And then you open it again.

_Oh, shit._

_Yeah, oh shit,_ snarls Tony.  He snorts, sunk deep into the couch, while his bandmates squirm on either side of him.  _Fucker overdosed like a fucking pussy loser._

 _Tony,_ says Sammy, such sympathy in his voice.  But Tony is having none of it.

 _His own damn fault if he can’t handle his fucking horse, man!_ he protests, turning his head to look at him for the first time in a solid fifteen minutes.  _Kid’s right, he got what he deserved._

 _Tony,_ mumbles Snazz this time, trying to reign him in again.  _Sorry… it’s still pretty raw,_ he says to you, frowning in sympathy.   _It’s only been like two weeks._

 _Two weeks,_ you echo weakly, pale faces and loaded needles dancing through your mind.  That gaunt face staring back at you… what you saw there, was that really – did you watch, you know?  Did you see him dying?  Or did you see him die – did you see his corpse, and kiss your girlfriend and just laugh?

 _It was all over the tabloids,_ says Sammy, drumming on the stool with his hands.  _Well, the ones that mattered, anyway._ You are desperately racking your mind for when it happened, then, when Janus’ soul left him – did you feel it, did you see it?  He was talking about playing with Mötley Crüe – oh, shit.  That’s the arena shows.  Then his last words – what were his last words?  Teasing you.  And about Tony – how Tony’s mom fucked David Bowie – about his friend, Tony…

When you look at Tony, his face is expressionless, his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses.  Nothing.  He gives away nothing.

 _The gigs are booked,_ says Howie, cryptically, _you have to play them._   Tony just grunts in response.  The other two are warmer, though skeptical of you.  You’ve basically ruined your chance here anyway by running your mouth, so you humor their questions about influences and experience.  What does it matter?  You won’t get it.  It’s over.  Tony says nothing.

But the thing has to be done, at least to satisfy Howie, and Snazz falls over himself to find cords and pedals for you and plug you into one of his amps.  The sooner you play, the sooner it’s over, and they can all go back to getting drunk or high in their bedrooms and forget any of this happened.  You feel shuffled out, but you want it over too.  Tony doesn’t move a fucking inch the whole time.  Then you’re perched there with your beautiful baby, the goldtop, over your lap – Snazz even cooed over it, told you how cool it was and gave you some advice on a shop that can patch up the dents, as if you could ever afford that – and you’re like, _uh, so, what do you want me to play?_   And no one has any ideas.

 _Mötley Crüe?_ suggests Sammy, and Snazz – standing over you with the manager now, you can see the pubes poking out around the legs of his underwear – scolds him for picking something so hard.  _Go easy on the kid, man._

 _I can play the Crüe,_ you say, but too quietly, playing with the chord shapes on the neck of your guitar.

 _Ramones?_ tries Sammy instead, and you scrunch your nose at him.

_Seriously?  Gimme some credit._

_You pick then, geeze._ So you do.

You start with a little Styx riff, a little _[Renegade](https://youtu.be/E9eLz4DrwF8?t=31),_ since Erin is still on your mind, but that’s not enough for you.  They listen closely as you blend it flawlessly into Skid Row, parroting the lyrics along with [_Youth Gone Wild_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RIeycixkK8), anxiously at first, under your breath.  You can feel them watching you as the warm Marshall amp fills the room with your chords, so rich and beautiful, and flared by Snazz’s overdrive – that he had to set and stomp for you, not quite knowing what to do with a pedal yourself.  Clearly it’s not enough, and you slide to your feet, the strap falling heavy on your shoulders.  If they’re going to just drop you, then you’re going to give them something to remember – give them a chance, when you’re there on MTV, to turn to their sad wives and say, the one that got away.

So this is Van Halen, [_Eruption_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Czx8EWXb0).  The fall of your hand first unspectacular, and then, something magic.  Note perfect - almost.  Like you’ve never played before.  Sammy says, _oh shit,_ and oh shit.  Snazz says _oh fuck,_ and yeah, oh fuck.  You can't believe your own fingers, the way they dance as your fringe falls over your face and the afternoon sun gleams off your golden guitar.  And Tony does not move.

Even Howie seems utterly shocked, standing back like you’ve burned him, and he’s meant to be selling you.  You twist it into the riff from [_Layla_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX5USg8_1gA), shimmering in the sunlight just as Eric Clapton should.  Then it’s _[Reelin’ In The Years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bwHK1xkgJA), _ and Snazz laughs out loud, his hair falling over his shoulders in waves as he turns away from you.  _Jesus!  Je-sus!  Get this kid in, you don’t need me.  I fucking quit!_ he jokes.  But it’s not enough.

When the reverb dies, Tony finally moves.  Barely.  Only to shift his shoulder and say, _great.  But we need a singer, not just a fucking guitarist._

 _I can sing,_ you say.  You’ve never really tried, but uh, you’re sure you can.  There’s something else at work here – you’ve never played like that in your whole life.  Suddenly you’re sure you can sing, and you let the guitar sling down to you hips as you feel out new shapes on its neck.  If you can just pick something…

Snazz turns you down, expectantly.  And you have an idea.  You don’t know any of _their_ songs yet.  But you do know their cover.  So this is _[Jumping Jack Flash](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkplklQQfFk),_ a Rolling Stones cover, with Snazz laughing at you so loud, so gladly, copying your poses with air guitar even though he can play this at least as well as you, if not better, and Sammy drumming along on his legs.  Tony, unmovable.  The voice comes out of you like you’re possessed, like your whole body is puppeted.  When you finish up, Snazz just stands back, his hands on his hips and a huge smile on his face, and says, _Shit, we gotta give it a shot._

Nothing from Tony, save a grunt.

 _You won’t regret it,_ says Howie, lighting a cigarillo.  He already has something bigger in mind – bigger than them, anyway.

Another grunt.  But Tony clearly is in charge.  You’re okay with it, if he doesn’t like it, he can jump.  You pack up your guitar with the other two gushing over you, telling you how good you are, how amazing you are kid, and you are smug about it.  Because it’s all you, it can’t be the people you’re with or – no.  It’s all you.  You’re a firebrand, and you’re going to burn this city down.

On your way out, Howie just says, _think it over,_ to Tony, and then ushers you back into the car.  He tells you he’s sure he’ll come around, but it doesn’t matter to you if he doesn’t.  And maybe that’s the secret, because a day later you get the call – at the Swan, called backstage by one of the girls.  It’s not a promise.  It’s not for good.  But they’ll give you a go.

And just like that, overnight, you’re a rock star.

**Author's Note:**

> In progress, always appreciate the comments.
> 
> This has been a heavy fic to write so I can only imagine it is to read. Here are some links if you need the support (all USA, I'm afraid, as I note the majority of my audience is American). Please don't feel afraid to ask for help, you matter.
> 
> [24/7 National Suicide Prevention Helpline](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)  
> [24/7 Lifeline Chat](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/)  
> [18/7 Trans Lifeline](https://www.translifeline.org/)  
> [Resources For Surviors of Sexual Assault and Their Loved Ones (inc. hotlines) (RAINN)](https://www.rainn.org/national-resources-sexual-assault-survivors-and-their-loved-ones)  
> [Human Trafficking Hotline](https://humantraffickinghotline.org/)


End file.
